ammar_ the best
instances of genial humours, shrewdness, and (when crotchets do not come
in too much) sound sense. But hardly anything that Cobbett writes is
contemptible in form, however weak he may often be in argument,
knowledge, and taste. He was the last, and he was not far below the
greatest, of the line of vernacular English writers of whom Latimer in
the sixteenth, Bunyan in the seventeenth, and Defoe in the eighteenth,
are the other emerging personalities. To a great extent Cobbett's style
was based on Swift; but the character of his education, which was not in
the very least degree academic, and still more the idiosyncrasy of his
genius, imposed on it almost from the first, but with ever-increasing
clearness, a manner quite different from Swift's, and, though often
imitated since, never reproduced. The "Letter to Jack Harrow," the
"Letter to the People of Botley," the "Letters to Old George Rose," and
that to "Alexander Baring, Loan Monger," to take examples almost at
random from the _Register_, are quite unlike anything before them or
anything after them. The best-known parody of Cobbett, that in _Rejected
Addresses_, gives rather a poor idea of his style; exhibiting no doubt
his intense egotism, his habit of half trivial divagation, and his use
of strong language, but quite failing to give the immense force, the
vivid clearness, and the sterling though not precisely scholarly English
which characterise his good work. The best imitation to be found is in
some of the anonymous pamphlets in which, in his later days, government
writers replied to his powerful and mischievous political diatribes, and
which in some cases, if internal evidence may be trusted, must have been
by no mean hands.

Irrational as Cobbett's views were,--he would have adjusted the entire
concerns of the nation with a view to the sole benefit of the
agricultural interest, would have done away with the standing army,
wiped out the national debt, and effected a few other trifling changes
with a perfectly light heart, while in minor matters his crotchets were
not only wild but simply irreconcilable with each other,--his intense if
narrow earnestness, his undoubting belief in himself, and a certain
geniality which could co-exist with very rough language towards his
opponents, would give his books a certain attraction even if their mere
style were less remarkable than it is. But it is in itself, if the most
plebeian, not the least virile, nor eve