armed battalions. Above all, while Cobbett went to prison to prevent the Prussianism of Germany from committing its cruelties in the British army, Carlyle in the same connection effected the most sublime and amazing feat of optimism that imagination can conceive. He was optimistic about the rise of Prussia. Set beside that, all other outbursts of complacency, Pope saying that whatever is is right, Browning saying that all is right with the world, Whitman saying that all that is is acceptable, fade by comparison into a gentle melancholy. The man who could be cheerful about Frederick the Great could be cheerful about anything.

But what was admired in Carlyle was what was admirable in Cobbett. What Carlyle, with all his merits, merely posed as being, Cobbett with all his faults really was. He was a Jeremiah, and a justified Jeremiah. He was a man who defied the world, and the way the world was going. He did not whitewash the squires to blacken the merchants, like Young England, or whitewash the merchants to blacken the squires, like the Manchester School. He laid about him on every side until he stood alone. He had the faults that go with such an isolation; but surely a man must be a little unimaginative, and even a little ungenerous, not to feel that it is in some ways a splendid isolation. Anyhow it is the isolation for which Carlyle was considered splendid. Indeed the different fate of the two protests is sufficiently significant as to the difference between the realistic and the merely romantic prophet of woe. Carlyle has been presented as a spectre of pessimism, a skeleton at the feast, a shadow in the sunlight, a presence

solemnly reminding us of death and doom. Cobbett has not been presented at all. He has been hidden. He is not the skeleton at the feast, but the skeleton in the cupboard.

And when we speak of him as a prophet, if only a prophet of woe, there is another fitness in the figure, though it be something more vague or more difficult to express. Cobbett would seem the very contrary of a mystic; yet it is hard not to write mystically about him. It was indeed the mark of many figures in the great revolutionary epoch, of Danton, of Napoleon, or of Washington, that they seem suited to be the heroes of whom epics are written rather than the poets who write them. Like the other three, Cobbett was of the eighteenth century in his refreshing rationality and lucidity; but in retrospect, as it recedes from us, that broad daylight takes on the colours of a bright but ominous sunset. The great lover of plain speech was the very reverse of a symbolist; but for all that he is a symbol. If William Blake could make such a medley of prophets and prigs as to conceive a symbolic design called "Pitt guiding Leviathan," he would have had a hundred times better reason to design one called "Cobbett Riding the Red Horse of the Apocalypse." And indeed the reference to Blake is not irrelevant. only is the halo of hatred round the figure of the old fighter something to which that dark dynamic genius might have done some justice; it is, moreover, true that the mixed feelings with which a modern critic must regard him are very like the medley of rustic realities and transcendental revelations in Blake's notes and verses at Felpham. As these seem to

Not

present a curious patchwork of green fields of Sussex and golden streets of Jerusalem, as we seem to see a foreground of divine tabernacles with a background of the Downs, so for any man looking back on the work of Cobbett there will mingle a pleasure in the naturalness of his love of England with a curious subconscious thrill at the vast forces he was defying and the huge destiny he was striving to divert. But we have lived to see those forces which he failed to baffle themselves beginning to fail, and that huge destiny betraying, by something more than dark hints, that it may be a huge mistake. The world went over Cobbett like a wave; but it looks as if the wave had touched the high-water mark and was already an ebbing tide. The problems of unemployment, of food in wartime, of the international tangle of trade, have raised new doubts that are very near to those old denunciations. Nobody now is certain that it was wise to make England the workshop of the world, especially when half the workshop is not working. Nobody now can repose in the retrospect of a merely mercantile trade increasing, especially if it is declining. Indeed, Cobbett's case, which in his own time was only answered by optimism, is now only answered by pessimism. The best that can now be said, for the industrialism then called inevitable, is to call it incurable. In other words, the critics of Cobbett, having silenced the great voice for a hundred years, have woken up to it just in time to say that it is too late. In any case it is with the return of unanswerable realities that his name has returned to us; there is nothing antiquarian or aesthetic about his resurrection. It was easy enough

to represent his comment on his own time as wild and fanatical; it is as a comment on our time that it is realistic and relevant. The prophet was certainly stoned, and nobody has yet seriously attempted to build his sepulchre; there is no monument save the size of the heap of stones-the sort of boulders under which men bury a giant. But even if we did set up in the market-place a worthy statue of Cobbett, the pedestal could only be inscribed with the irritating maxim: "I told you so." The present increase of his prestige owes nothing to favour or pleasure or the modern sort of popularity. It is a victory very rare even in the annals of prophets. His prophecies were forgotten until they were fulfilled.

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VOL. III, N.S.