Page:The English Peasant.djvu/298

 Perhaps the secret of this is that he used literature as a vehicle, not as an end. It was not so much his object to be thought a great author as to preach his ideas. Like his literary progenitor, he so felt his vocation to be that of a political writer that he never could quite throw it off, even in the most homely of his works. In his Spelling-book the very first fable has a political moral, while his Grammar is full from beginning to end with the most amusing thrusts at distinguished statesmen, bishops, and other highly placed persons.

His style has been compared in its power of graphic narration to Defoe, in its charming simplicity and homely wisdom to Franklin; but it is to the writer whom we have denominated his literary progenitor that we must look for an almost complete parallel. Cobbett wrote, like Swift, in the most nervous, racy, homely, yet absolutely correct English. Both aimed to be thought writers of the utmost simplicity and honesty of character. Both cultivated a habit of minute observation and description. On the road to the most vindictive political warfare, both linger by the way to relate, with Dutch-like painting, trifling circumstances in their lives, singular adventures, or homely scenes, in which they have taken part, touching off their own characters or those of their companions in such a way as to render questions long since settled full of interest to the most unlearned and non-political of readers.

There is a passage in Lord Jeffreys' remarks on the literary characteristics of Swift, almost applicable word for word to Cobbett:—"It is no small proof of the vigour and vivacity of his genius that posterity should have been so anxious to preserve these careless and hasty productions upon which the author appears to have set no other value than as means for the attainment of an end. The truth is, accordingly, that they are very extraordinary performances, and considered with a view to the purposes for which they were intended, have probably never been equalled in any period of the world. They are written with great plainness and intrepidity, advance at once to the matter in dispute, give battle to the strength of the enemy, and never seek any kind of advantage from darkness or obscurity. Their distinguishing feature, however, is the force and vehemence of the invective