(his _Common Sense_ or _Rights of Man_) we are struck (not to say
somewhat refreshed) by the difference. Paine is a much more sententious
writer than Cobbett. You cannot open a page in any of his best and
earlier works without meeting with some maxim, some antithetical and
memorable saying, which is a sort of starting-place for the argument,
and the goal to which it returns. There is not a single _bon mot_, a
single sentence in Cobbett that has ever been quoted again. If anything
is ever quoted from him, it is an epithet of abuse or a nickname. He is
an excellent hand at invention in that way, and has 'damnable iteration'
in him. What could be better than his pestering Erskine year after year
with his second title of Baron Clackmannan? He is rather too fond of
_the Sons and Daughters of Corruption_. Paine affected to reduce things
to first principles, to announce self-evident truths. Cobbett troubles
himself about little but the details and local circumstances. The first
appeared to have made up his mind beforehand to certain opinions, and to
try to find the most compendious and pointed expressions for them: his
successor appears to have no clue, no fixed or leading principles, nor
ever to have thought on a question till he sits down to write about it;
but then there seems no end of his matters of fact and raw materials,
which are brought out in all their strength and sharpness from not
having been squared or frittered down or vamped up to suit a theory--he
goes on with his descriptions and illustrations as if he would never
come to a stop; they have all the force of novelty with all the
familiarity of old acquaintance; his knowledge grows out of the subject,
and his style is that of a man who has an absolute intuition of what he
is talking about, and never thinks of anything else. He deals in
premises and speaks to evidence--the coming to a conclusion and summing
up (which was Paine's _forte_) lies in a smaller compass. The one could
not compose an elementary treatise on politics to become a manual for
the popular reader, nor could the other in all probability have kept up