Born at Farnham, Surrey, England, March 9, 1762: died near Farnham, June 18, 1835. A noted English political writer. He was the son of a peasant, obtained a meager education, enlisted in the army about 1783, obtained his discharge about 1791, and in 1792 emigrated to America. From 1797 to 1799 he published at Philadelphia “Porcupine’s Gazette,” a Federalist daily newspaper. He returned to England in 1800. In January, 1802, he began at London the publication of “Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register,” which, with trifling interruptions, was continued until his death; and in 1803 began to publish the “Parliamentary Debates,” which in 1812 passed into the hands of T. C. Hansard. He at first supported the government, but about 1804 joined the opposition, with the result that he was several times fined for libel, and in 1810 sentenced to imprisonment for two years. He was elected to Parliament as member for Oldham in 1832, and again in 1834. Author of “Porcupine’s Works” (1801–02), “A Grammar of the English Language” (1818), a grammar and a dictionary of the French language, “Cottage Economy” (1821), “The Emigrant’s Guide” (1828), “Advice to Young Men and, incidentally, to Young Women” (1830), etc.

Personal

  I had this day as a visitor one of the most distinguished literary and political characters which ever adorned this or any other country, namely Mr. William Cobbett…. Mr. Cobbett is now in his sixty-seventh year. He is above six feet high, stout made, of a plump, ruddy countenance, and has a most winning and engaging smile. His hair is as white as the driven snow. His whole appearance is of the most engaging and gentlemanly kind. He is a singularly abstemious and temperate man; never eating anything after dinner, with the exception of a little bread to his tea. He avoids spirits, wine, ale, porter. His dislike to all these things is so great that he will not sit down in a room where they are used. His common drink is a little skim milk. He goes to bed at eight or nine o’clock, and rises by four or five in the morning.

  He presented himself before an impatient house, filled from floor to ceiling, which rose to greet him in a tumultuous rapture. His appearance is highly favourable; his ease, tact, and self-possession, are unrivalled. He was neither overpowered nor taken by surprise with these demonstrations of the Modern Athenians, but received them all as matter of course, which came a little in the way of proceeding to business. Mr. Cobbett is still of stately stature, and must, in youth, have been tall. He must then in physiognomy, person, and bearing, have been a fine specimen of the true Saxon breed,—

	The eyes of azure, and the locks of brown,
	And the blunt speech, that bursts without a pause,
	And free-born thoughts, which league the soldier with the laws.

As, with the “Ciceronian suavity” he had promised to assume, he presented himself before the “critical audience of Edinburgh,” he looked like an old English gentleman

Of the good olden time—

a hearty Essex or Hampshire squire, of the fourth magnitude, whose woods are flourishing, and his paternal acres unmortgaged, dressed for a dinner of some ceremony, in a coat of the best Saxon blue broadcloth, with its full complement of gilt buttons, and an ample white waistcoat, with flowing skirts. His thin, white hairs, and high forehead—the humour lurking in the eye, and playing about the lips, betokened something more than the squire in his gala-suit; still he altogether was of this respectable and responsible kind. His voice is low-toned, clear, and flexible; and so skillfully modulated, that not an aspiration was lost of his nervous, fluent, unhesitating, and perfectly correct discourse.

  Mr. Cobbett, in personal stature, was tall and athletic. I should think he could not have been less than six feet, while his breadth was proportionally great. He was, indeed, one of the stoutest men in the house. I have said there was a tendency to corpulency about him. His hair was of a milk-white colour, and his complexion ruddy. His features were not strongly marked. What struck you most about his face was his small, sparkling, laughing eyes. When disposed to be humorous himself, you had only to look at his eyes and you were sure to sympathise in his merriment. When not speaking, the expression of his eyes and his countenance was very different. He was one of the most striking refutations of the principles of Lavater I ever witnessed. Never were the books of any man more completely at variance with his character. There was something so dull and heavy about his whole appearance, that any one who did not know him, would at once have set him down for some country clodpole—to use a favourite expression of his own—who not only never read a book, or had a single idea in his head, but who was a mere mass of mortality, without a particle of sensibility of any kind in his composition. He usually sat with one leg over the other, his head slightly drooping, as if sleeping, on his breast, and his hat down almost to his eyes.

	O bear him where the rain can fall,
	And where the winds can blow;
	And let the sun weep o’er his pall
	As to the grave ye go!
	And in some little lone churchyard,
	Beside the growing corn,
	Lay gentle Nature’s stern prose bard,
	Her mightiest peasant-born.
	Yes! let the wild-flower wed his grave,
	That bees may murmur near,
	When o’er his last home bend the brave,
	And say—“A man lies here!”
	For Britons honor Cobbett’s name,
	Though rashly oft he spoke;
	And none can scorn, and few will blame,
	The low-laid heart of oak.
	See, o’er his prostrate branches, see!
	E’en factious hate consents
	To reverence, in the fallen tree,
	His British lineaments.

  Cobbett was not only an example of self-instruction, but of public teaching. He said, on some occasion, many years ago, “It is certain that I have been the great enlightener of the people of England;” and so he was. The newspapers have not, that we are aware, adverted to our deepest obligation to him. He was the inventor of Twopenny Tracts. Let the title be inscribed on his monument. The infamous Six Acts, although they suspend the machinery for awhile of cheap political publications, could not undo what had been done, nor avert its great immediate, and far greater eventual utility. If only for that good work, honoured be the memory of old Cobbett.

	A labourer’s son, ’mid squires and lords
	Strong on his own stout legs he stood,
	Well-armed in bold and trenchant wit;
	And well they learned that tempted it,
	That his was English blood.
	And every wound his victim felt
	Had in his eyes a separate charm;
	Yet, better than successful strife
	He loved the memory of his life,
	In boyhood, on the farm.

  With two or three qualities more, Cobbett would have been a very great man in the world; as it was, he made a great noise in it…. The immediate cause of his death was water on the chest. He was buried, according to his own desire, in a simple manner in the churchyard of Farnham, in the same mould as that in which his father and grandfather had been laid before him. His death struck people with surprise, for few could remember the commencement of his course, and there had seemed in it no middle and no decline; for though he went down to the grave an old man, he was young in the path he had lately started upon. He left a gap in the public mind which no one else could fill or attempt to fill up, for his loss was not merely that of a man, but of a habit—of a dose of strong drink which all of us had been taking for years, most of us during our lives, and which it was impossible for any one again to concoct so strongly, so strangely, with so much spice and flavour, or with such a variety of ingredients. And there was this peculiarity in the general regret—it extended to all persons.

  Cobbett rose, under singular difficulties, many of which were of his own creation, from the condition of a farmer’s boy to that of a member of the British Parliament…. Cobbett’s marriage was eminently characteristic. When he was in New Brunswick, he saw, on an early December morning, a girl, not more than thirteen years of age, scrubbing a washtub in the snow. She was the daughter of a soldier, a serjeant-major like Cobbett himself. He resolved to marry her in due time. It seems that his project was favoured by the girl’s father. Three or four years after he made this resolve, the parents of the girl were ordered back to Woolwich. Cobbett, thinking the risks of a residence in this town were neither few nor slight, recommended her to take up her residence with some decent people who would board her; and to meet this expense he handed her over all his savings, amounting to 150 guineas. They then parted for three or four years. When he returned to England, he found her engaged as a maid-of-all-work in a family. She returned him his 150 guineas unbroken, and in a few weeks they were married.

  Much of Cobbett’s wonderful staying-power lay in his splendid mental and physical health. An active and temperate existence, in which nothing was allowed to run to waste, warded off the approaches of senility. Excepting only a tumour which gave some trouble for a few months during 1824, he had known nothing of illness; beyond those trifling matters to which even the best constitutions are liable under given circumstances. After reaching his three score-and-ten, he could still boast of riding over the country with the youngest; or doing a day’s work against any one of his labourers. This was an astonishingly active, fully-worked life; in which nothing of the morbid could possibly find entrance. An early riser, and no lingerer at meals, Cobbett never confessed to having any leisure time. Social pleasures, as such, would seem to have been almost unheeded, if not despised. Yet his hospitality was unbounded, and overflowing with good nature; and he was always at the service of persons who applied to him for advice, or, even, of those nondescript individuals who would claim the privileges of half-acquaintanceship, and call upon him to indulge a sort of curiosity.

  The round, rosy, rather heavy face, the flaxen hair, the powerful and thick-set frame, the general air of hearty animal vigor,—all bespeak his nationality; and mind and character corresponded to the body which inclosed them. In every incident of Cobbett’s life, the sturdy, stubborn persistence, the love of home and independence, the delight in fighting for fighting’s sake, and the utter incapacity to recognize defeat,—all of which mark the Anglo-Saxon,—come out with wonderful clearness, and form a combination of qualities for which one may look in vain among other nations.

  He made but a poor figure in the House; had not a scintillation of eloquence, and his manner was brusque almost to coarseness. The rudeness that is so often mistaken for independence never at any time “told” there, where the greatest and the humblest are certain to find their true level; and if there be any who recall him to memory, with a faint idea that they may accord to it respect, it will not be as seated on the Opposition bench of the House of Commons. Though he spoke often, he never made what might have been called “a speech.” He seemed always on guard lest he might commit himself; indeed, in the House he never seemed at home, and was by no means the virtuous contemner of his superiors he was expected to have been; few who listened to him would have thought they heard the author of much envenomed bitterness—the quality that so continually characterized his written words.

General

  Have you seen Cobbett’s last number? It is the most plausible and the best written of anything I have seen from his pen, and apparently written in a less fiendish spirit than the average of his weekly effusions. The self-complacency with which he assumes to himself exclusively, truths which he can call his own only as a horse-stealer can appropriate a stolen horse, by adding mutilation and deformities to robbery, is as artful as it is amusing.

  This [“Cottage Economy”] is an excellent little book—written not only with admirable clearness and good sense, but in a very earnest and entertaining manner—and abounding with kind and good feelings, as well as with most valuable information: And as we have never scrupled openly to express our disapprobation of Mr. Cobbett’s conduct and writings, when we thought him in the wrong, we shall scarcely be suspected of partiality in the gratitude we now profess to him, and the endeavour we make to assist his exertions for the benefit of by far the most numerous and important part of society—the labouring classes.

  People have about as substantial an idea of Cobbett as they have of Cribb. His blows are as hard, and he himself is as impenetrable. One has no notion of him as making use of a fine pen, but a great mutton-fist; his style stuns his readers, and he “fillips the ear of the public with a three-man beetle.”… He is one of those writers who can never tire us—not even of himself; and the reason is, he is always “full of matter.” He never runs to lees, never gives us the vapid leavings of himself, is never “weary, stale and unprofitable,” but always setting out afresh on his journey, clearing away some old nuisance, and turning up new mould. His egotism is delightful, for there is no affectation in it. He does not talk of himself for lack of something to write about, but because some circumstance that has happened to himself is the best possible illustration of the subject, and he is not the man to shrink from giving the best possible illustration of the subject from a squeamish delicacy. He likes both himself and his subject too well…. He throws his head into his adversary’s stomach, and takes away from him all inclination for the fight, hits fair or foul, strikes at every thing, and as you come up to his aid or stand ready to pursue his advantage, trips up your heels or lays you sprawling, and pummels you when down as much to his heart’s content as ever the Yanguesian carriers belaboured Rosinante with their pack-staves. “He has the back-trick simply the best of any man in Illyria.” He pays off both scores of old friendship and new-acquired enmity in a breath, in one perpetual volley, one raking fire of “arrowy sleet” shot from his pen. However his own reputation or the cause may suffer in consequence, he cares not one pin about that, so that he disables all who oppose or who pretend to help him.

  I am reading Cobbett’s work on gardening, and it makes me long for a plot to sow endive and cauliflower in. I am not yet come to his remarks on flower-gardening, but I expect that it will be more disquieting than the cabbage and salad dispensation. What a clever writer he is! Whatever his faults may be as a politician, he has true genius, and that he shows by the extraordinary interest he gives to common subjects.

  This author did not in any way advance the practice of agriculture, either by precept or example; but he adorned the parts that have been mentioned, by his homely knowledge of the art, and most agreeable delineation. He did not grasp the art as a comprehensive whole, nor did he aspire to the higher branches, among which to indulge a lofty seat of view and ideal elevation.

  It would be well worth the while of some competent editor to form a selection from Cobbett’s multifarious writings. Since Swift, from whom he derived his style, there has been no more remarkable writer of terse, idiomatic English, and especially of the language of vituperation. When he was seeking work in Kew Gardens, at ten years old, he slept under a haystack, reading the “Tale of a Tub” as long as daylight lasted. His mind was not reserved or thoughtful enough to appropriate the irony of his great master; but in the “Political Register” there are lampoons as bitter, and almost as forcible and witty, as those of Swift himself. In his miscellaneous writings, such as his “English Grammar,” Cobbett always digresses, from time to time, into gratuitous attacks on the multitudinous objects of his indignation…. In the “Rural Rides,” which are perhaps the most peaceable and pleasant of his works, he interrupts a receipt for curing bacon, by an exhortation to the farmer’s wife, not to let the Methodist preacher wheedle her out of a rasher when her husband is from home. In his writings, with all their faults, there is unfailing vigour, and a total absence of the maudlin sentimentality which disgraces, in the present day, the degenerate literature of agitation and discontent.

  As a political writer Cobbett, who occupied a first place in the criticism of current politics for more than forty years, had few rivals. He was a great master of that homely, idiomatic English, which is persuasive by its very plainness and lack of ornament, and which is exhibited in its perfection by another farmer’s son—another politician, but also a statesman of the highest and noblest type.

  Had he full scholastic instruction, and the benefit of extensive reading, his abilities, cultivated and improved, might have placed his name with many of the highest in literature. As it was, his boldness wanted knowledge and judgment to control it; he was ignorant of much that the most ordinary writers ought to understand; he had no proper conception of the estimate in which the giants of literature are to be held. He pronounced it easy to imitate Shakspeare because the public had been partially deluded for a while by Ireland’s “Vortigern;” and easy to copy Milton, because any one could make angels and devils fight like men. Having sense to see the vanity of pretending to be what he was not, he affected to decry what he did not possess; and yet, though he proclaimed his contempt for the learned languages as useless, he would fain have had his public think that he was not altogether ignorant of them, as was shown by his writing always per centum, and introducing now and then a Latin expression…. In the style in which he set forth his declarations, however extravagant, there was sure to be something attractive; whatever he supported or assailed, his readers would never fail to find something to interest or amuse them.

  He was a great master of clear and forcible idiomatic English. His “Rural Rides” expounds the homely aspects of English scenery with much picturesqueness and graphic neatness of touch. In his political diatribes he indulged in a licence of invective and abuse almost incredible to newspaper readers of this generation, although it was not so much above the ordinary heat of his time.

  He was the comet of the literary hemisphere, dazzling the world with his brilliancy, perplexing it with his eccentricity, and alarming it with his apparent inflammability.

  As a writer Cobbett belongs to the school of Swift, for whose “Tale of a Tub” he sacrificed his supper; but he is far from being Swift’s equal, for the Dean was a great genius and Cobbett was not. The pupil has neither the refinements of style nor the keenness of satire for which the master is still preëminent. But Cobbett possessed in ample measure Swift’s simplicity of diction and strength of phrase, and he used pure Saxton to an extent and with a power which is well worth study at the present day.

  Even his long expositions of past quarrels, and spiteful, personal attacks upon men dead and forgotten, have a certain interest, so living is the narrative, full of hot impulse and feeling, and boundless graphic detail. And in the foreground of everything he writes, the centre of all, is always that lively, amusing, hot-headed, wrong-headed self, a being inaccessible to reason, swayed by sudden impulses, by rapid mistaken impressions, by side gleams of confused reflection and distorted perspective so far as concerned the great public affairs into which he rashly threw himself without training for the work or understanding of its real bearings. But when we turn to the other side of his character, and find him in scenes which he thoroughly understands, in the fresh rural landscapes, and humble thrifty houses, and village economics among which he was bred, he is a very different person. Occasionally we come to a bit of fine observation of nature which would not have misbecome White of Selborne: and his pictures of home-scenery are often as touching and real in English sweetness and homely subdued beauty as if they had come from the hands of Gainsborough or Constable.

  We believe him to be the most voluminous writer in our language, with the exception—if, indeed, he be an exception—of William Prynne; and we would take this opportunity of saying that if any one would know of what our language is capable, then let him study the writings of William Cobbett.

  Were the well-meaning persons to have their way who long for the establishment of an English Academy, one wonders what would be the attitude of such an august body towards a writer like Cobbett. And yet his claim to rank as a classic admits, I suppose, of little question. The position he holds among the immortals he has taken, as it were, by storm; and what no favour of literary clique helped to gain, no passing whim of favour can take away…. Of the merits of Cobbett’s style there can be no question. In his moods of most frantic violence, dancing a war-dance around Lord Castlereagh’s dead body, or covering with the foulest abuse the honoured name of Burke, the manner of his writing never lacks in skill. We may not approve the music it gives forth, but we cannot but allow that the pipe is never out of tune. Nor is the secret of the merits of his style far to seek. Of none other does the saying of Buffon hold more profoundly true that “le style c’est l’homme.” His very weaknesses as a man lent strength to his writing. Because he was obstinate, narrow-minded, and could see only the one side of a question, therefore his sight had nothing to distract it from seeing what he did see with perfect distinctness, and from describing that with perfect accuracy. It is surely no mere coincidence that in our times a similar intellectual harvest, and that the greatest of living English orators recalls in his obstinacy and in his self-sufficiency, no less than by the spell of his eloquence, the memory of Cobbett.

  As a writer of pure English, Cobbett stands out almost unrivalled, and hundreds of passages might be quoted from his writings which are masterpieces of diction. He did not draw his illustrations from the fantasies of a perplexed brain, but from that nature which is always ready to reveal her secrets to those who love her. You will find his descriptions of scenery as true as those of Sir Walter Scott, and flowers and trees and coppices and wolds and woodlands and the birds and beasts that belong to them, are all put in their proper places. His word-paintings savour sometimes of almost an excessive realism.

  Nobody now would say of him as William Hazlitt said, under the more direct influence of his personal energy and power, that “he might be said to have the cleverness of Swift, the naturalness of Defoe, and the picturesque satirical description of Mandeville.” He was perhaps as strong a man as Bernard Mandeville; but he had the cleverness of Swift without the genius, and Defoe’s naturalness without the imagination that enabled Defoe to shape the real into an ideal, and in “Robinson Crusoe” to produce a work having some part of the nature of a poem, though Defoe, like Cobbett, was essentially a man of prose. Cobbett belaboured to good purpose the big drum of politics, and blew a trumpet all his own. But the plain speech of Cobbett was as honest and as resolute as the plain speech of Luther; and Luther in the conflict did not measure his words.

  The total is huge; for Cobbett’s industry and facility of work were both appalling, and while his good work is constantly disfigured by rubbish, there is hardly a single parcel of his rubbish in which there is not good work…. As happens with all writers of his kidney he is not easily to be characterised. Like certain wines he has the goût du terroir; and that gust is rarely or never definable in words. It is however I think critically safe to say that the intensity and peculiarity of Cobbett’s literary savour are in the ratio of his limitation. He was content to ignore so vast a number of things, he so bravely pushed his ignorance into contempt of them and almost into denial of their real existence, that the other things are real for him and in his writings to a degree almost unexampled. I am not the first by many to suggest that we are too diffuse in our modern imagination, that we are cumbered about too many things. No one could bring this accusation against Cobbett; for immense as his variety is in particulars, these particulars group themselves under comparatively few general heads. I do not think I have been unjust in suggesting that this ideal was little more than the bellyful, that Messer Gaster was not only his first but his one and sufficient master of arts.

  In Cobbett we have little of refinement, little of resource, little liberal equipment; but the tradition of common sense is still a vigorous force, and in his almost enthusiastic inculcation of lucidity and correctness of style, he keeps alive one of the best inheritances from the eighteenth century.

  His words flowed as easily as his thoughts. His anecdotes, and especially his epithets, clung to the memory. He made no pretence of profound learning. He dealt out facts and arguments closely within the range of the ideas and experience of ordinary Englishmen; and he was a “popular writer” in the sense of one who wrote what all could understand. The naïveté of his egotism disarmed his critics. He rivalled Junius in the rich discursiveness of his vituperation. He had all the infallibility of a newspaper editor, without wearing the usual mask of one.

  A brutal personality, excellently muscular, snatching at words as the handiest weapons wherewith to inflict itself, and the whole body of its thoughts and preferences, on suffering humanity, is likely enough to deride the daintiness of conscious art. Such a writer is William Cobbett, who has often been praised for the manly simplicity of his style, which he raised into a kind of creed. His power is undeniable; his diction, though he knew it not, both choice and chaste; yet page after page of his writing suggests only the reflection that here is a prodigal waste of good English. He bludgeons all he touches, and spends the same monotonous emphasis on his dislike of tea and on his hatred of the Government. His is the simplicity of a crude and violent mind, concerned only with giving forcible expression to its unquestioned prejudices, irrelevance, the besetting sin of the ill-educated, he glories in, so that his very weakness puts on the semblance of strength, and helps to wield the hammer.

  Cobbett’s inconsistencies are a proverb. Few publicists have contradicted themselves so flatly and so often, and yet produced so powerful an impression of tenacity and honesty. His opinions shifted like a kaleidoscope, but the man was hewn out of rock. His copiousness was enormous, and though he did not adorn all that he touched, he touched nothing without setting his unmistakable stamp upon it. Grammar, finance, church history, farming, practical morality, and a score of other subjects Cobbett stripped of pedantry and technique for the behoof of the vast uneducated mob of Georgian England…. All that is strong, sinewy, and simple in Cobbett seems to have filtered through, unalloyed, into his English style, which his harshest critics have accordingly praised without reserve. He may swell with arrogance, but his prose never becomes timid; his facts and his reasons may be grotesque, but he never chooses the wrong word. His fundamentally concrete mind was too ready to brandish scientific formulas of which he half grasped the scope; but the same fundamentally concrete quality of mind which prevented him from being a master of theory, or a shaper of ideas, preserved him, as a writer, from the abstract formalism of style which the later eighteenth century bequeathed to the early nineteenth. His style is himself, full of personal flavour, anecdote, colloquial turns, questions, gibes, nick names, apparently disdaining all literary distinction. In function, if not in genius, he is the Burns of modern prose, and his example, though less efficacious, was not less salutary, in the generation which gathered its political teaching among the technicalities of Bentham, the verbosities of Mackintosh, and the involutions of Coleridge.

  For years displayed, amid many extravagances of prejudice and crudities of utterance, a command of racy, homely, and vigorous English which made him the most popular, if not the most powerful, political writer of his time.