has no notion of him as making use of a fine pen, but a great
mutton-fist; his style stuns his readers, and he 'fillips the ear of the
public with a three-man beetle.' He is too much for any single
newspaper antagonist; 'lays waste' a city orator or Member of
Parliament, and bears hard upon the Government itself. He is a kind of
_fourth estate_ in the politics of the country. He is not only
unquestionably the most powerful political writer of the present day,
but one of the best writers in the language. He speaks and thinks
plain, broad, downright English. He might be said to have the clearness
of Swift, the naturalness of Defoe, and the picturesque satirical
description of Mandeville; if all such comparisons were not impertinent.
A really great and original writer is like nobody but himself. In one
sense, Sterne was not a wit, nor Shakespear a poet. It is easy to
describe second-rate talents, because they fall into a class and enlist
under a standard; but first-rate powers defy calculation or comparison,
and can be defined only by themselves. They are _sui generis_, and make
the class to which they belong. I have tried half a dozen times to
describe Burke's style without ever succeeding,--its severe
extravagance; its literal boldness; its matter-of-fact hyperboles; its
running away with a subject, and from it at the same time,--but there is
no making it out, for there is no example of the same thing anywhere
else. We have no common measure to refer to; and his qualities
contradict even themselves.

Cobbett is not so difficult. He has been compared to Paine; and so far
it is true there are no two writers who come more into juxtaposition
from the nature of their subjects, from the internal resources on which
they draw, and from the popular effect of their writings and their
adaptation (though that is a bad word in the present case) to the
capacity of every reader. But still if we turn to a volume of Paine's