or Reflections, is always a pamphleteer in heart and
soul, in form and matter. If the resemblance of his pamphlets to
speeches gives the force and fire, it is certain that the resemblance
of his speeches to pamphlets accounts for that 'dinner-bell' effect of
his which has puzzled some people and shocked others. Burke always
argued the point, if he only argued one side of it, and it is the
special as it is the saving grace of the pamphlet that it must, or at
least should, be an argument, and not merely an invective or an
innuendo, a sermon or a lampoon.

Sydney Smith belonged both to the old school and the new. He was both
pamphleteer and journalist; but he kept the form and even to some
extent the style of his pamphlets and his articles well apart. I may
seem likely to have some difficulty in admitting the claim of Cobbett
after disallowing that of Junius under the definition just given, but
I have no very great fear of being unable to making it good. Much as
Cobbett disliked persons, and crotchety as he was in his dislikes,
they were always dislikes of principle in the bottom. The singular
Tory-Radicalism which Cobbett exhibited, and which has made some rank
him unduly low, was no doubt partly due to accidents of birth and
education, and to narrowness of intellectual form. But boroughmongering
after all was a Whig rather than a Tory institution, and Cobbett's
hatred of it, as well as that desire for the maintenance of a kind of
manufacturing yeomanry (not wholly different from the later ideal of
Mr. William Morris,) which was his other guiding principle throughout,
was by no means alien from pure Toryism. His work in relation to Reform,
moreover, is unmistakable--as unmistakable as is that of Sydney Smith,
who precedes him here, with regard to Catholic Emancipation. I should
have voted and written against both these things had I lived then; but
this does not make me enjoy Cobbett or Sydney any the less.

As for the latest example I have selected, it is a crucial one. The
_Letters of Malachi Malagrowther_ come from a man who is not often
rated high as a political thinker, even by those who sympathise with
his political views. But here as elsewhere the politician, no less
than the poet, the critic, the historian, bears the penalty of the
pre-eminent greatness of the novelist. Nothing is more uncritical than
to regard Scott as a mere sentimentalist in politics, and I cannot
think that any competent judge can do so after