COBBETT, THE CONTENTIOUS MAN.
Part I.
FROM HIS BIRTH, IN MARCH, 1762, TO HIS QUITTING THE UNITED STATES, JUNE 1ST, 1800.
Son of a small farmer.—Boyhood spent in the country.—Runs away from home.—Becomes a lawyer’s clerk.—Enlists as a soldier, 1784.—Learns grammar and studies Swift.—Goes to Canada.—Remarked for good conduct.—Rises to rank of sergeant-major.—Gets discharge, 1791.—Marries.—Quits Europe for United States.—Starts as a bookseller in Pennsylvania.—Becomes a political writer of great power.—Takes a violent anti-republican tone.—Has to suffer different prosecutions, and at last sets sail for England.
I.
The character which I am now tempted to delineate is just the reverse of that which I rise from describing. Mackintosh was a man of great powers of reasoning, of accomplished learning, but of little or no sustained energy. His vision took a wide and calm range; he saw all things coolly, dispassionately, and, except at his first entry into life, was never so lost in his admiration of one object as to overlook the rest. His fault lay in rather the opposite extreme; his perception of the universal weakened that of the particular, and the variety of colours which appeared at once before him became too blended in his sight for the adequate appreciation of each.
The subject of this memoir, on the contrary, though he could argue well in favour of any opinion he adopted, had not that elevated and philosophic cast of mind which makes men inquire after truth for the sake of truth, regarding its pursuit as a delight, its attainment as a duty. Neither could he take that comprehensive view of affairs which affords to the judgment an ample scope for the comparison and selection of opinions. But he possessed a rapid power of concentration; a will that scorned opposition; he saw clearly that one side of a question which caught his attention; and pursued the object he had momentarily in view with an energy that never recoiled before a danger, and was rarely arrested by a scruple. The sense of his force gave him the passion for action; but he encouraged this passion until it became restlessness, a desire to fight rather for the pleasure of fighting than for devotion to any cause for which he fought.
While Mackintosh always struggled against his character, and thereby never gave himself fair play, the person of whom I am now about to speak—borne away in a perfectly opposite extreme—allowed his character to usurp and govern his abilities, frequently without either usefulness or aim. Thus, the one changed sides two or three times in his life, from that want of natural ardour which creates strong attachments; the other attacked and defended various parties with a furious zeal, upon which no one could rely, because it proceeded from the temporary caprice of a whimsical imagination, and not from the stedfast enthusiasm of any well-meditated conviction. 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. But I pass from criticism to narrative.
II.
William Cobbett was born in the neighbourhood of Farnham, on the 9th of March, 1762. The remotest ancestor he had ever heard of was his grandfather, who had been a day labourer, and, according to the rustic habits of old times, worked with the same farmer from the day of his marriage to that of his death. The son, Cobbett’s parent, was a man superior to the generality of persons in his station of life. He could not only read and write, but he knew also a little mathematics; understood land surveying, was honest and industrious, and had thus risen from the position of labourer, a position in which he was born, to that of having labourers under him.
Cobbett’s boyhood, I may say his childhood, was passed in the fields: first he was seen frightening the birds from the turnips, then weeding wheat, then leading a horse at harrowing barley, finally joining the reapers at harvest, driving the team, and holding the plough. His literary instruction was small, and only such as he could acquire at home. It was shrewdly asked by Dr. Johnson, “What becomes of all the clever schoolboys?” In fact, many of the boys clever at school are not heard of afterwards, because if they are docile they are also timid, and attend to the routine of education less from the love of learning than the want of animal spirits. Cobbett was not a boy of this kind. At the age of sixteen he determined to go to sea, but could not get a captain to take him. At the age of seventeen he quitted his home (having already, when much younger, done so in search of adventures), and without communicating his design to any one, started, dressed in his Sunday clothes, for the great city of London. Here, owing to the kind exertions of a passenger in the coach in which this his first journey was made, he got engaged after some time and trouble as under-clerk to an attorney (Mr. Holland), in Gray’s Inn Lane.