top,
Curling their monstrous heads, and _hanging_ them
With deafening clamour in the slippery clouds."

without seeing an immense balloon rising from the ground, with
Shakespeare grinning over the edge of the car, and saying, "You can't
stop me: I am above reason now." That is the nearest we can get to the
general national spirit, which we have now to follow through one brief
and curious but very national episode.

Three years before the young queen was crowned, William Cobbett was
buried at Farnham. It may seem strange to begin with this great
neglected name, rather than the old age of Wordsworth or the young death
of Shelley. But to any one who feels literature as human, the empty
chair of Cobbett is more solemn and significant than the throne. With
him died the sort of democracy that was a return to Nature, and which
only poets and mobs can understand. After him Radicalism is urban--and
Toryism suburban. Going through green Warwickshire, Cobbett might have
thought of the crops and Shelley of the clouds. But Shelley would have
called Birmingham what Cobbett called it--a hell-hole. Cobbett was one
with after Liberals in the ideal of Man under an equal law, a citizen of
no mean city. He differed from after Liberals in strongly affirming that
Liverpool and Leeds are mean cities.

It is no idle Hibernianism to say that towards the end of the eighteenth
century the most important event in English history happened in France.
It would seem still more perverse, yet it would be still more precise,
to say that the most important event in English history was the event
that never happened at all--the English Revolution on the lines of the
French Revolution. Its failure was not due to any lack of fervour or
even ferocity in those who would have brought it about: from the time
when the first shout went up for Wilkes to the time when the last
Luddite fires were quenched in a cold rain of rationalism, the spirit of
Cobbett, of rural republicanism, of English and patriotic democracy,
burned like a beacon. The revolution failed because it was foiled by
another revolution; an aristocratic revolution, a victory of the rich
over the poor. It was about this time that the common lands were finally
enclosed; that the more cruel game laws were first established; that
England became finally a land of landlords instead of common
land-owners. I will not call it a Tory reaction; for much of the worst
of it (especially of the land-grabb