serial novels of Dickens were afterwards to be. Dickens, by the way,
inherited the same instinct for abrupt diction, and probably enjoyed
writing "gas and gaiters" more than any two other words in his works.
But Dickens was narrower than Cobbett, not by any fault of his own, but
because in the intervening epoch of the triumph of Scrooge and Gradgrind
the link with our Christian past had been lost, save in the single
matter of Christmas, which Dickens rescued romantically and by a
hair's-breadth escape. Cobbett was a yeoman; that is, a man free and
farming a small estate. By Dickens's time, yeomen seemed as antiquated
as bowmen. Cobbett was mediaeval; that is, he was in almost every way
the opposite of what that word means to-day. He was as egalitarian as
St. Francis, and as independent as Robin Hood. Like that other yeoman in
the ballad, he bore in hand a mighty bow; what some of his enemies would
have called a long bow. But though he sometimes overshot the mark of
truth, he never shot away from it, like Froude. His account of that
sixteenth century in which the mediaeval civilisation ended, is not more
and not less picturesque than Froude's: the difference is in the dull
detail of truth. That crisis was _not_ the foundling of a strong Tudor
monarchy, for the monarchy almost immediately perished; it _was_ the
founding of a strong class holding all the capital and land, for it
holds them to this day. Cobbett would have asked nothing better than to
bend his mediaeval bow to the cry of "St. George for Merry England," for
though he pointed to the other and uglier side of the Waterloo medal,
he was patriotic; and his premonitions were rather against Blucher than
Wellington. But if we take that old war-cry as his final word (and he
would have accepted it) we must note how every term in it points away
from what the modern plutocrats call either progress or empire. It
involves the invocation of saints, the most popular and the most
forbidden form of mediævalism. The modern Imperialist no more thinks of
St. George in England than he thinks of St. John in St. John's Wood. It