they were always dislikes of principle in the bottom. The singular
Tory-Radicalism which Cobbett exhibited, and which has made some rank
him unduly low, was no doubt partly due to accidents of birth and
education, and to narrowness of intellectual form. But boroughmongering
after all was a Whig rather than a Tory institution, and Cobbett's
hatred of it, as well as that desire for the maintenance of a kind of
manufacturing yeomanry (not wholly different from the later ideal of
Mr. William Morris,) which was his other guiding principle throughout,
was by no means alien from pure Toryism. His work in relation to Reform,
moreover, is unmistakable--as unmistakable as is that of Sydney Smith,
who precedes him here, with regard to Catholic Emancipation. I should
have voted and written against both these things had I lived then; but
this does not make me enjoy Cobbett or Sydney any the less.

As for the latest example I have selected, it is a crucial one. The
_Letters of Malachi Malagrowther_ come from a man who is not often
rated high as a political thinker, even by those who sympathise with
his political views. But here as elsewhere the politician, no less
than the poet, the critic, the historian, bears the penalty of the
pre-eminent greatness of the novelist. Nothing is more uncritical than
to regard Scott as a mere sentimentalist in politics, and I cannot
think that any competent judge can do so after reading _Malagrowther_,
even after reading Scott's own Diary and letters on the subject. As he
there explains, he was not greatly carried, as a rule, to interest
himself in the details of politics. As both Lockhart and he admit, he
might not have been so interested even at this juncture had it not
been for the chagrin at his own misfortunes, which, nobly and
stoically repressed as it was, required some issue. But his general
principle on this occasion was clear; it can be thoroughly apprehended
and appreciated even by an Englishman of Englishmen. It was thoroughly