has been indefatigable in writing. Both from Long-Island and from Kensington, his Registers, and other works innumerable, have issued in regular succession. And what the result? Total apathy! complete neglect! not a soul to listen to him-nobody to buy his paper!-I speak, of course, comparatively. A considerable circulation, as compared with other weekly writers, he has all along maintained-but compared with what he himself was, or with what John Bull is he is, and has long been, nothing, absolutely no. thing. He has sunk, as to these matters, into the second, if not the third class-which, remembering what Cobbett used to be, the high, haughty, and undisputed pre-eminence of his popularity, is certainly worse than ceasing to be altogether at least I think so and I suspect Cobbett in his own sulky inner soul agrees with me.

The pot-houses say he is bribed by the Ministry; of course, this is no more true of Cobbett than it is of John Bull. The present Ministry bribe no literary aides-de-camp-least of all such ones as Cobbett:-they well know, that whatever is the feeling of any considerable portion of the English population, will and must find a fitting organ of expression; and well knowing, as they would be fools if they did not know, that their cause is that of by far the greater proportion of the wealth, of the virtue, and of the talent of the empire; they, of course, can have no reason to doubt at any time, that their cause must be that also of the more respectable and influential portion of the press. It is their thorough reliance on this that accounts for the apparent apathy by

which their general treatment of the press is characterized. They know that they have the stronger part of the press on their side, not because they, like the Whig Walpole, make bribery of pamphleteers a regular sinequa-non in all their operations, but because they know and feel that they owe their own existence as Ministers to the universal predominance (in literature as in all other departments) of those very principles on which their policy has been built and established. Having this knowledge, it follows that they take no pains either about rewarding the Tory writers of this age, or punishing or repressing the press-gang of Whiggery. Why should they do either the one or the other? They know that literature is not now a thing to be managed, or even to be meddled with, in the old style. The days are gone by when L.30,000 was considered a sufficient sum to bribe all Scotland-and the days are equally gone when British Ministers of State used to consider the bribes of the gemmen of the press as necessary a part of the expenses of the year, as the pay of the army and navy. The truth is, that the press has become such a thing, that the Ministry, if they bribed at all, must bribe more than even England could afford. Only think for a moment-what sort of bribes could they offer to such literary men as they have the pride and glory of being supported by?

Mr Thomas Campbell is a person I have a most particular affection, as well as respect, for; but what does he mean by taunting Mr Wordsworth, in his last Magazine, with the possession of a little office in the Stamp-depart

"F. BURDETT."

ment? What does Tom Campbell mean by treating Wordsworth at all in this strain? He is so absurd as to talk about Mr Wordsworth being "a clever man," and an "unpopular poet," &c. &c. I pitied Tom when I read the passage-I truly pitied him. I was sorry to see a true poet like him lending himself to a party so far as to abuse a POET, whom, in his secret heart, he must feel to be immeasurably his own superior. Campbell railing at Wordsworth! What would you think of Bion or Moschus turning up their noses at Æschylus or Plato? Besides, what was Tom thinking of? Wordsworth, after all, only succeeded to an office, an established and a necessary office, the duties of which, I suppose, nobody ever ventured to hint he is not most perfectly qualified to discharge; whereas-what think ye of the Whig plan?-when your friends were in, in 1806, Tom, a new office, and certainly not a very necessary one, was CREATED for the benefit of Mr Dugald Stewart-The office of Gazettewriter for Scotland-salary, I think, L.400 per annum. I mention the thing only to shew how little you Whigs are in the habit of looking to the beam in your own eye-not assuredly for the sake of taking a cut at Mr Stewart, whose genius and virtue well entitled him, if that had been all, to rewards infinitely above those which his party found, or, to speak more properly, formed, this opportunity of bestowing on him. I don't object to Mr Stewart's sinecure; I only say it is ridiculous in the Whigs to sneer, during his incumbency, at Mr Wordsworth's possession of an office, which, after all, is not a sinecure, seeing that it is an office which cannot be put into the hands of anybody but one capable of finding security to a most serious extent, and which, therefore, implies anxious superintendance of a public fund; while Mr Stewart's office is, as is notorious to all the world, as complete a sinccure as the recordership of the Duke of Sussex his jeux d'esprit (if such a thing existed) could possibly be.

Cobbett, Canning, Campbell, Wordsworth, Dugald Stewart, and the Duke of Sussex! there is a pretty specimen of the art noble of digression! Return we, suo periculo, to the Sage of Kensington.

I called him, a little ago, "the Hero of Humbug ;" and yet, in one

view of the matter, there is, perhaps, less of humbug about William Cobbett, than about any one author of our time. He is, I rather suspect, the only one author who could stand up in any one given place, at any one given hour, with any one given production of his in his hand, and say, "here am I,and here is my production," without giving occasion to a horselaugh-ay, and being ready to join in it himself. It is very true, that he has contradicted himself five thousand times over, and that five thousand times more grossly than any other writer in or out of existence: that is all true; but, laying consistency, and all that sort of thing, entirely out of view, and looking solely to the style and strain of the sentiment and expression of any given passage in all his voluminous works, is there one that his intellect could possibly hesitate about avowing for its progeny?" I was wrong when I wrote that-I was misinformed, I was mistaken; but it was I that wrote itnobody else could have written it ;it is mine, and, passing the mistake, (or whatever you like to call it,) I glory in it." Such would be his language, and such it ought to be. Speaking of him morally and politically, he is the most inconsistent of all men ; but, talking of intellect only, and of the general bearing and character of mind and expression, he is the most consistent. He is the greatest hero of humbug in the one view-its greatest enemy in the other. The massive weight of his weapon is ever the same -a perpetual contrast, and a perpetual reproach, to the unsteadiness of his purpose. Weathercock he is; but he is one molten in the days of the giants.

You ask what I mean by this assertion, that Cobbett is, in any sense whatever, the most consistent of all living writers of the English tongue. I illustrate by a query or two. Take Lord Byron with the grin of exulting satire on his lips-take him when he is just winding up one of his best stanzas in Beppo, and ask him, pointing to some lachrymose piece of fustian in Faliero, who wrote that? Would he not shrug up his shoulders, and beg pardon-beg you to spare him any farther interrogatories? Or take him in the other vein-take him at midnight, pacing his chamber, conceiving the Dream of

Sardanapalus, or the Apparition of the Witch of the Alps, or Lara's last Battle-take him then, and ask him who wrote such or such a vile, low, punning, sneering squib, about Mrs Coleridge or Mrs Southey-this gentle manlike attack upon the personal appearance of an elegant and accomplished PRINCE, or that heroic denunciation of a GOVERNESS-ask him such a question, at such a moment, and would he not, as Shakespeare words it, "blush to see a nobleman want manners ?"

Take Wordsworth, in the act of writing his Laodamia, and ask him if it was he that indited such or such a frantic note about Jeffrey! Take Jeffrey himself, in the act of reading Laodamia, and ask him if it was he that wrote such or such a quiz upon "the Stamp-collector for Cumberland." Take anybody, but Cobbett-him you will never catch. Did he ever blush? did he ever confess repentance? Did he ever apologize to himself, or to any body else? He would as soon think of apologizing for the dinner that he ate three days ago, as for the libel that he uttered three years ago. He, he alone, is," totus teres atque rotundus :"-he rides through every storm with one "Cobbettum vehis" in his mouth; "What cannoneer begat the unebbing

blood ?"

It is this, perhaps, that gives, more than any one particular besides, the distinct and peculiar character of Cobbett's genius. The thing, the very existence of the thing, implies the most absolute negation of all candour, decency, modesty, &c. &c. &c.; but it brings with it an ineffable air of power and determination, such as, considering things merely intellectually, adds prodigiously to the effect of his genius. Give him the moral qualities and feelings of other men, and double his genius, it is much to be doubted whether, on the whole, (still intellectually speak ing, mind ye,) he would have any reason to thank you for the change.

It would be more than idiocy to address anybody about Cobbett, in any other character than his bare intel

lectual character. If there be anybody who puts the least faith in anything he says, merely because he says it, that body must be destitute of soul. He has contradicted in and in, until the breed of his assertions are known by him that runs for their rickety imbecility.— But although nobody believes anything because Cobbett says it, it by no means follows that things are not true although Cobbett says them. My reason for writing to you about Cobbett, in short, is just this-I think the neglect into which he has fallen deprives people in general of a vast deal of entertainment; and I would fain justify what I say by a few extracts from some of those recent productions of his, which, just because they bear his name, have been received with perfect apathy-in other words, have never sold at all among what you or I would call "the reading public"-although, had the tithe of the shrewdness, wit, and English, they contain, come forth under any other auspices, there can be no sort of doubt the attention of the reading public, in all its branches, must have been most effectually roused.*

The "Year's Residence in America" is a little duodecimo, and costs five shillings. It is mostly written in the really be considered as furnishing a form of a diary; and, I believe, may tolerably exact picture of Cobbett's life and thoughts during the first twelve months of his last Transatlantic sojourn. A short and casual notice in the Quarterly must have sufficiently informed your readers, that Cobbett violently attacks the Birkbeck plan of emigrating to the Prairies

and indeed the back settlements generally. He judges, and rightly judges, that native Americans are the proper pioneers of the wilderness, and that, if English people will emigrate, they ought to settle in those parts of the country where the least violence will be done to their old habits-where they can have cleared land to cultivate, tolerable houses to live in, and labour for the paying. I shall have occasion, perhaps, to quote some passages on those heads hereafter; but, in the

passage,

meantime, I wish Just to turn over the leaves, and tell you what bits struck my fancy most, when I read the book with attention, and with a pencil in my hand, a few weeks ago. First, then, I find a great + at this which occurs in his notice for the 15th of January, 1818, he being then at Philadelphia, where, as all the world knows, he had, in former days, been no stranger. I positively know of nobody who can be more pathetic in a certain way, than William Cobbett, when it so pleases him. The passage, on re-reading it, really strikes me as most beautiful.

"Same weather. The question eagerly put to me by every one in Philadelphia is, Don't you think the city greatly improved? They seem to me to confound augmentation with improvement. It always was a fine city, since I first knew it; and it is very greatly augmented. It has, I believe, nearly doubled its extent and number of houses since the year 1799. But, after being, for so long a time, familiar with London, every other place appears little. After living within a few hundreds of yards of Westminster-Hall and the Abbey Church and the Bridge, and looking from my own windows into St James's Park, all other buildings and spots appear mean and insignificant. I went to-day to see the house I formerly occupied. How small! It is always thus: the words large and small are carried about with us in our minds, and we forget real dimensions. The idea, such as it was received, remains during our absence from the object. When I returned to England, in 1800, after an absence from the country parts of it, of sixteen years, the trees, the hedges, even the parks and woods, seemed so small! It made me laugh to hear little gutters, that I could jump over, called Rivers! The Thames was but a "Creek! But when, in about a month after my arrival in London, I went to Farn ham, the place of my birth, what was my surprise! Everything was become so pitifully small! I had to cross, in my postchaise, the long and dreary heath of Bagshot. Then, at the end of it, to mount a hill, called Hungry Hill; and from that hill I knew that I should look down into the beautiful and fertile vale of Farnham. My heart fluttered with impatience, mixed with a sort of fear, to see all the scenes of my childhood; for I had learnt before, the death of my father and mother. There is a hill, not far from the town, called Crooksbury Hill, which rises up out of a flat, in the form of a cone, and is planted with Scotch fir-trees. Here I used to take the eggs and young ones of crows and magpies. This hill was a famous object in the neighbourhood. It served as the superla

tive degree of height. As high as Crooksbury Hill' meant, with us, the utmost degree of height. Therefore, the first object that my eyes sought was this hill. I could not believe my eyes! Literally speaking, I for a moment thought the famous hill re for I had seen in New Brunswick, a single moved, and a little heap put in its stead; rock, or hill of solid rock, ten times as big, and four or five times as high! The postboy, going down hill, and not a bad road, whisked me, in a few minutes to the Bush Inn, from the garden of which I could see the prodigious sand hill, where I had begun my gardening works. What a nothing! But now came rushing into my mind, all at once, my pretty little garden, my little blue smock-frock, my little nailed shoes, my pretty pigeons that I used to feed out of my gentle and tender-hearted and affecof my hands, the last kind words and tears

tionate mother! I hastened back into the room. If I had looked a moment longer, I should have dropped. When I came to reflect, what a change! I looked down at my dress. What a change! What scenes I had gone through! How altered my state! I had dined the day before at a Secretary of State's in company with Mr Pitt, and had been waited upon by men in gaudy liveries! I had had nobody to assist me in the world. No teachers of any sort. Nobody to shelter me from the consequence of bad, and no one to counsel me to good, behaviour. I felt proud. The distinctions of rank, birth, and wealth, all became nothing in my eyes; and from that moment (less than a month after my arrival in England) I resolved never to bend before them."

The following occurs almost immediately afterwards.

"18, 19, 20, and 21. Moderate frost. Fine clear sky. The Philadelphians are cleanly, a quality which they owe chiefly to the Quakers. But, after being long and recently familiar with the towns in Surrey and Hampshire, and especially with Guildford, Alton, and Southampton, no other towns appear clean and neat, not even Bath or Salisbury, which last is about much upon a par, in point of cleanliness, with Philadelphia; and Salisbury is deemed a very cleanly place. Blandford and Dorchester are clean; but I have never yet seen anything like the towns in Surrey and Hampshire. If a Frenchman, born and bred, could be taken up and carried blindfolded to Guildford, I wonder what his sensations would be, when he came to have the use of his sight! Everything near Guildford seems to have received an influence from the town. Hedges, gates, stiles, gardens, houses inside and out, and the dresses of the people. The market day at Guildford is a perfect show of cleanliness. Not even a carter without a clean smock-frock and closely-shaven and

clean-washed face. Well may Mr Birkbeck, who came from this very spot, think the people dirty in the western country! I'll engage he finds more dirt upon the necks and faces of one family of his present neighbours, than he left behind him upon the skins of all the people in the three parishes of Guildford. However, he would not have found this to be the case in Pennsylvania, and especially in those parts where the Quakers abound; and, I am told, that, in the New England States, the people are as cleanly and as neat as they are in England. The sweetest flowers, when they become putrid, stink the most; and a nasty woman is the nastiest thing in nature."

On the 11th of March, we find him travelling through New Jersey; and always himself.

"This part of Jersey is a sad spectacle, after leaving the brightest of all the bright parts of Pennsylvania. My driver, who is a tavern-keeper himself, would have been a very pleasant companion, if he had not drunk so much spirits on the road. This is the great misfortune of America! As we were going up a hill very slowly, I could perceive him looking very hard at my cheek for some time. At last, he said, 'I am wondering, sir, to see you look so fresh and 80 young, considering what you have gone through in the world;' though I cannot imagine how he had learnt who I was. I'll tell you,' said I, how I have contrived the thing. I rise early, go to bed early, eat sparingly, never drink anything stronger than small beer, shave once a day, and wash my hands and face clean three times a-day, at the very least.' He said, that was too much to think of doing."

Of the same sobriety he thus vaunts a hundred pages farther on, in the heat of July:

"Since my turnips were sown, I have written great part of a Grammar, and have sent twenty Registers to England, besides writing letters amounting to a reasonable volume in bulk; the whole of which has made an average of nine pages of common print a day, Sundays included. And, besides this, I have been twelve days from home, on business, and about five on visits. Now, whatever may have been the quality of the writings; whether they demanded mind or not, is no matter; they demanded time for the fingers to move in, and yet, I have not written a hundred pages by candle-light. A man knows not what he can do 'till he tries. But, then, mind, I have always been up with the cocks and hens; and I have drunk nothing but milk and water. It is a saying, that wine inspires wit; and that in wine there is truth."' These sayings are the apologies of drink VOL. XIV.

ers. Everything that produces intoxication, though in but the slightest degree, is injurious to the mind; whether it be such to the body or not, is a matter of far less consequence. My letter to Mr Tierney, on the state of the Paper Money, has, I find, produced a great and general impression in England. The subject was of great importance, and the treating it involved much of that sort of reasoning which is the most difficult of execution. That Letter, consisting of thirty-two full pages of print, I wrote in one day, and that, too, on the 11th of July, the hottest day in the year. But, I never could have done this, if I had been guzzling wine, or grog, or beer, or cider, all the day. I hope the reader will excuse this digression; and, for my own part, I think nothing of the charge of egotism, if, by indulging in it, I produce a proof of the excellent effects of sobriety. It is not drunkenness that I cry out against; that is beastly, and beneath my notice. It is drinking : for a man may be a great drinker, and yet no drunkard. He may accustom himself to swallow, till his belly is a sort of tub. The Spaniards, who are a very sober people, call such a man a wine bag,' it being the custom in that country to put wine into bags, made of skins or hides. And, indeed, wine bag, or grog bag, or beer bag, is the suitable appellation."

The critics of the last age used to talk of the " audacity of Dryden, for binding himself to write three plays perannum!" Alas! there was no Cobbetts, Southeys, Byrons, Great Unknowns, in these times! Hear him again in the dead of winter.

"There is one thing in the Americans, which, though its proper place was farther back, I have reserved, or rather kept back, till the last moment. It has presented itself several times; but I have turned from the thought, as men do from thinking of any mortal disease that is at work in their frame. It is covetousness; it is not niggardliness; it is not insincerity; it is not enviousness; it is not cowardice, above all things: it is DRINKING. Ay, and that too, amongst but too many men, who, one would think, would loathe it. You can go into hardly any man's house, without being asked to drink wine, or spirits, even in the morning. They are quick at meals, are little eaters, seem to care little about what they eat, and never talk about it. This, which arises out of theuniversal abundance of good and even fine eatables, is very amiable. You are here disgusted with none of those eaters by reputation that are found, especially amongst the Parsons, in England: fellows that unbutton at it. Nor do the Americans sit and tope much after dinner, and talk on till they get into nonsense and smut, which last is a sure mark of a silly,

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