The task of that historian will find its best reward, in the endeavour to comprehend the first quarter of the nineteenth century. He will see the press first enslaved, then reckless, then persecuted; then partially enslaved again; then gradually presenting a prospect that it will, one day or other, become purified into something like dignity and respectability. For all this long while, it has been strangely unable to endure rivalry and opposition; and its members have vied with one another, as to which could employ the foulest epithets, impute the wickedest motives to opponents, or fawn the most gracefully upon “patrons.” There was no place for independence, in those days; for independent principles were considered to hide the wolf of Jacobinism. The alteration in tone, consequent upon a change of proprietorship, went under the favourite stigma of “profligacy.”[2] As for party-spirit, there never was a truer dictum than that laid down by Mr. Cobbett, in one of the later numbers of the London Porcupine: “The press is as much shackled and restrained by the spirit of party, as it could be by the most restrictive laws.”
From the day of the first appearance of the Political Register, a new æra dawned for journalism. Its originality in plan, and the power with which it was written, awakened envy; its plain English, and rapid acquisition of independence in opinion, provoked opposition. And the success, with which its early career was marked, brought imitators into the field. But that which soon characterized it, more particularly, was an inflexible hostility to such newspapers, and such persons, who endeavoured to extenuate or explain away the misuse of public money. People sadly wanted educating upon this point. The principles of Walpole and Newcastle had borne fruit. The Treasury was surrounded by hungry adventurers; and there were hundreds of men, as late as William Pitt’s time, who had sucked-in these principles, as it were, with their mothers’ milk. And if we consider that, when Cobbett began the fight, and for some time after, there was no one else had the courage, or was in the mind, to expose it all, we shall understand the singular position in which he stood. For an anonymous writer to sit down, and write off a malicious paragraph or two with insinuations of venality, was one thing; but, for a man, well-known in the flesh, renouncing the editorial “we,” and affecting the first-person-singular, proceeding to tell a plain story, fearless of the consequences, was a phenomenon which startled Society; the effect produced being similar to that which occurs upon poking your walking-stick into an ants’ nest.
Decent Society never forgave Mr. Cobbett. No matter! Upon that man’s memory lies the credit of having been chiefly instrumental in restoring political purity to the nation. The whole domestic history of England, between 1800 and 1835, is distinguished by the struggles of the nation to emancipate itself from corruption in Church and State. The pioneer was William Cobbett; and no history of those struggles, which does not place him high among the “leaders and guiders” of men, will be worthy of the name.
As to how far Mr. Cobbett’s ideas and predictions have been accepted, is not the purpose of the present work; if, even, its limits did not forbid such an essay. It is certain that he was largely pirated, during his lifetime, both in speeches and in newspaper articles. But he lost so much weight, in the minds of dispassionate men, by such unbounded extravagance as was displayed in his “History of the Reformation;” and his cotemporaries were so cruelly lashed and scolded, when the advocacy of their own views exceeded the truth, that the significance of his career could not be properly understood by his generation. It is almost surprising that more bad institutions did not fall before his trenchant blows; yet, with respect to those that remain,[3] and are doomed, it may safely be recommended to ransack the Political Register for the best arguments and illustrations, with which to defy their supporters. On many great questions Cobbett was far in advance of his time; perhaps on nothing more so than in the foresight with which he contemplated the development of popular ideas. To us, in Liberal-Conservative times, the following passage (May, 1833) seems a commonplace; but, to the privileged classes of his own days, the words were as the words of Micaiah in the ears of Ahab:—
“It is not by harshly and rudely resisting the claims of the people, that you put a stop to the progress of democracy. It is by yielding in time; by yielding to what is manifestly just in the people’s demands; by removing expenses so clearly unjust towards the people, and so clearly unnecessary to the support of good and efficient government; it is by taking from their backs burdens which they cannot bear without ruin; and which they ought not to bear at all. It is by means like these; by doing these things, which satisfy all reasonable men, and putting them on your side; it is by these that you check, and put a stop to, the progress of democracy; and not by acts which plainly tell the people that they are to expect no redress of their grievances as long as the present order of things shall exist.”
The grave was literally his last enemy. The announcement of Cobbett’s death was the close of a strife, in which had been displayed the singular spectacle of the Champion of the Press arrayed against its own licentiousness; in which the dangers attendant upon the conjuring up of new foes had been counted as nothing, while there was a principle to be maintained, or a touch of cant to be exposed. And, now that he was gone for ever, the whole fraternity acknowledged his genius and his talents; and confessed that a good, and great, and honest heart had departed from among them. Throughout the land, with almost unanimity, the newspapers teemed with his praises; and those were not few, who, having not long since boasted of their hatred, now frankly declared that Mr. Cobbett was a man of whom his countrymen might justly be proud, as one of the greatest that England had ever produced.
The last years of Mr. Cobbett’s domestic life were of singular tranquillity. Surrounded as he was by a family, the individual members of which had “never caused him a day’s anxiety,” his hearth was a complete antithesis to the stormy scenes outside. And he had that felicity, the first wish of every good man’s heart, of seeing his sons and daughters bear the fruits of his own example, in a correct estimate of the duties and the discipline of life. Not only that. Age never came upon him in crabbed form. There was a soft, genial nature about Mr. Cobbett, which no surface vehemence could exorcise. Even, when dealing his heaviest blows upon the heads of the poor “borough-mongers,” or when pouring his most terrible sarcasms around, his energy was the energy of warmth; as though heated with his own heart’s blood. It would be difficult to find any one essay among his writings, which, fairly analyzed, did not betray honest, impetuous affection for the cause immediately on hand. You cannot fail, as you read, to recognize the unpaid advocate. That he was ridiculously vain of his success in life, is no more than could be expected of a half-educated man, who had held, for more than a generation, such extraordinary power with the lower and middle classes; but such vanity, fostered sometimes by individuals and sometimes by the crowd, was not of that sort typified by the Napoleons and the Masaniellos of life. No: the sword laid down, and the helm removed from the brow, left this warrior a homely citizen, resting with the children, and the birds, the fruits and flowers, and the sweetest hospitalities.
So, old age brought nothing to Mr. Cobbett, of the burthen. “Always at work or sleep,” the work he did at seventy years of age was not excelled in quality by that of any previous period of his life; and, had it not been for the enforced change of habits brought about by his attendance in parliament, he might have lived another decade or so. He had, even, inured himself to noisy Fleet Street. Speaking, somewhere, of his upper room in Bolt Court, he says,—
“The birds sing better, and sing louder, and more, and stronger in a cage, than they do when at large;” adding that “the best pastorals have been written in smoky garrets.” Naturally enough, if a man hath a garden in his own heart.