From that hour, the sword which had been so near laying by to rust, had its blade new tempered, whilst the scabbard was clean cast away for ever.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Augustus de Morgan gives a story which he had from Francis Place. Place was, with others, advising Cobbett as to the proper line of defence. “Said Place, ‘You must put in the letters you have received from Ministers, Members of the Commons, from the Speaker downwards, about your Register, and their wish to have subjects noted. You must then ask the jury whether a person so addressed must be considered as a common sower of sedition, &c. You will be acquitted; nay, if your intention should get about, very likely they will manage to stop proceedings.’ Cobbett was too much disturbed to listen; he walked about the room, ejaculating, ‘D—— the prison!’ and the like. He had not the sense to follow the advice, and was convicted.” Vide “Budget of Paradoxes,” p. 119.
[2] Robert Huish, who is by no means favourably disposed towards Cobbett, says upon this point, “The truth was on Cobbett’s side, as every one can substantiate who had ever the misfortune to reside in the place where the German mercenaries were quartered.”
[3] “The use which Sir Vicary Gibbs generally made of his power of issuing ex officio informations was to lay an information against the offending writers, but not to proceed to trial, exacting a promise from them that, if he did not pursue it, they would write nothing offensive to the Government, and thus holding it in terrorem over their heads.”—Andrews’s “British Journalism,” ii. 57.
[4] This omitting to write for two or three weeks, together with the rumoured dropping of the Register, created tremendous sensation among the scribbling fraternity. The Morning Chronicle returned to Cobbett all the warm feelings which Perry had received from him. The Examiner, on the other hand, was mercilessly unjust. That vigorous paper was then in its early priggish days, and could brook no rivalry. Leigh Hunt looked with contempt upon all the set of Cobbetts and Cochranes, as not Reformists after his sort, and he now proceeded to attack Cobbett violently for his timidity, and for his whining about being torn from his home, &c.; adding that politicians must be prepared to endanger individual freedom for the sake of the general good. But then the “spirit of martyrdom had been inculcated” in the Hunts from the very cradle.
The readers of the Examiner, however, were not at one with their editor upon this point. One correspondent thought it ill-befitting a Reformist to overlook all the merits of a fellow-labourer, just at the moment of his being down, and “to dwell with a malignant ecstasy on all the failings that industrious malice could scrape together from years of bold and zealous service.” It was also pointed out, with much justice, that Mr. Cobbett was singular in this: that he not only confessed his errors when he had found them out, but argued clearly and decisively against them. Of course, the Examiner was so clever that it had no errors to retract.
Leigh Hunt appears to have discovered, in after-years, that he often made extravagant demands upon other people’s virtue; and the allusion, in his autobiography, to some want of charity toward other people’s opinions, points to this period, when intolerance could animate the Radical quite as easily as the privileged mind.
Mr. Redhead Yorke had long been converted from Radicalism, and had no sympathy for the delinquent. But he was, now, on the other side.