Historical Characters

There can be no general comparison between Montaigne and Mackintosh. The first was an original thinker, and the latter a combiner and retailer of the thoughts of others. But I have often pictured to myself the French philosopher lounging away the greatest portion of his life in the old square turret of his château, yielding to his laziness all that it exacted from him, and becoming, almost in spite of himself, the first magistrate of his town, and, though carelessly and discursively, the greatest writer of his time. He gave the rein to the idleness of his nature, and had reason to be satisfied with the employment of his life.

On the other hand, let us look at the accomplished Scotchman, constantly agitated by his aspirations after fame and his inclinations for repose; formed for literary ease, forcing himself into political conflict – dreaming of a long-laboured history, and writing a hasty article in a review; earnest about nothing, because the objects to which he momentarily directed his efforts were not likely to give the permanent distinction for which he pined; and thus, with a doubtful mind and a broken career, achieving little that was worthy of his abilities, or equal to the expectations of his friends. I have said there can be no general comparison between men whose particular faculties were no doubt of a very different order; yet, had the one mixed in contest with the bold and factious spirits of his day, he would have been but a poor “ligueur;” and had the other abstained from politics and renounced long and laborious compositions, merely writing under the stimulus of some accidental inspiration, it is probable that his name would have gone down to posterity as that of the most agreeable and instructive essayist of his remarkable epoch. But at all events that name is graven on the monument which commemorates more Christian manners and more mild legislation: and “Blessed shall he be,” as said our great lawyer, “who layeth the first stone of this building; more blessed he that proceeds in it; most of all he that finisheth it in the glory of God, and the honour of our king and nation.”

COBBETT, THE CONTENTIOUS MAN

Part I

FROM HIS BIRTH, IN MARCH, 1762, TO HIS QUITTING THE UNITED STATES, JUNE 1ST, 1800

Son of a small farmer. – Boyhood spent in the country. – Runs away from home. – Becomes a lawyer’s clerk. – Enlists as a soldier, 1784. – Learns grammar and studies Swift. – Goes to Canada. – Remarked for good conduct. – Rises to rank of sergeant-major. – Gets discharge, 1791. – Marries. – Quits Europe for United States. – Starts as a bookseller in Pennsylvania. – Becomes a political writer of great power. – Takes a violent anti-republican tone. – Has to suffer different prosecutions, and at last sets sail for England.

I

The character which I am now tempted to delineate is just the reverse of that which I rise from describing. Mackintosh was a man of great powers of reasoning, of accomplished learning, but of little or no sustained energy. His vision took a wide and calm range; he saw all things coolly, dispassionately, and, except at his first entry into life, was never so lost in his admiration of one object as to overlook the rest. His fault lay in rather the opposite extreme; his perception of the universal weakened that of the particular, and the variety of colours which appeared at once before him became too blended in his sight for the adequate appreciation of each.

The subject of this memoir, on the contrary, though he could argue well in favour of any opinion he adopted, had not that elevated and philosophic cast of mind which makes men inquire after truth for the sake of truth, regarding its pursuit as a delight, its attainment as a duty. Neither could he take that comprehensive view of affairs which affords to the judgment an ample scope for the comparison and selection of opinions. But he possessed a rapid power of concentration; a will that scorned opposition; he saw clearly that one side of a question which caught his attention; and pursued the object he had momentarily in view with an energy that never recoiled before a danger, and was rarely arrested by a scruple. The sense of his force gave him the passion for action; but he encouraged this passion until it became restlessness, a desire to fight rather for the pleasure of fighting than for devotion to any cause for which he fought.

While Mackintosh always struggled against his character, and thereby never gave himself fair play, the person of whom I am now about to speak – borne away in a perfectly opposite extreme – allowed his character to usurp and govern his abilities, frequently without either usefulness or aim. Thus, the one changed sides two or three times in his life, from that want of natural ardour which creates strong attachments; the other attacked and defended various parties with a furious zeal, upon which no one could rely, because it proceeded from the temporary caprice of a whimsical imagination, and not from the stedfast enthusiasm of any well-meditated conviction. With two or three qualities more, Cobbett would have been a very great man in the world; as it was, he made a great noise in it. But I pass from criticism to narrative.

II

William Cobbett was born in the neighbourhood of Farnham, on the 9th of March, 1762. The remotest ancestor he had ever heard of was his grandfather, who had been a day labourer, and, according to the rustic habits of old times, worked with the same farmer from the day of his marriage to that of his death. The son, Cobbett’s parent, was a man superior to the generality of persons in his station of life. He could not only read and write, but he knew also a little mathematics; understood land surveying, was honest and industrious, and had thus risen from the position of labourer, a position in which he was born, to that of having labourers under him.

Cobbett’s boyhood, I may say his childhood, was passed in the fields: first he was seen frightening the birds from the turnips, then weeding wheat, then leading a horse at harrowing barley, finally joining the reapers at harvest, driving the team, and holding the plough. His literary instruction was small, and only such as he could acquire at home. It was shrewdly asked by Dr. Johnson, “What becomes of all the clever schoolboys?” In fact, many of the boys clever at school are not heard of afterwards, because if they are docile they are also timid, and attend to the routine of education less from the love of learning than the want of animal spirits. Cobbett was not a boy of this kind. At the age of sixteen he determined to go to sea, but could not get a captain to take him. At the age of seventeen he quitted his home (having already, when much younger, done so in search of adventures), and without communicating his design to any one, started, dressed in his Sunday clothes, for the great city of London. Here, owing to the kind exertions of a passenger in the coach in which this his first journey was made, he got engaged after some time and trouble as under-clerk to an attorney (Mr. Holland), in Gray’s Inn Lane.

It is natural enough that to a lad accustomed to fresh air, green fields, and out-of-door exercise, the close atmosphere, dull aspect, and sedentary position awaiting an attorney’s under-clerk at Gray’s Inn must have been hateful. But William Cobbett never once thought of escaping from what he called “an earthly hell” by a return to his home and friends. This would have been to confess himself beaten, which he never meant to be. On the contrary, rushing from one bold step to another still more so, he enlisted himself (1784) as a soldier in a regiment intended to serve in Nova Scotia. His father, though somewhat of his own stern and surly nature, begged, prayed, and remonstrated. But it was useless. The recruit, however, had some months to pass in England, since, peace having taken place, there was no hurry in sending off the troops. These months he spent in Chatham, storing his brains with the lore of a circulating library, and his heart with love-dreams of the librarian’s daughter.

To this period he owed what he always considered his most valuable acquisition, a knowledge of his native language; the assiduity with which he gave himself up to study, on this occasion, insured his success and evinced his character. He wrote out the whole of an English grammar two or three times; he got it by heart; he repeated it every morning and evening, and he imposed on himself the task of saying it over once every time that he mounted guard. “I learned grammar,” he himself says, “when I was a private soldier on the pay of sixpence a day. The edge of my berth, or that of the guard-bed, was my seat to study on; my knapsack was my book-case, a bit of board lying on my lap was my writing-table, and the task did not demand anything like a year of my life.” Such is will. In America, Cobbett remained as a soldier till the month of September, 1791, when his regiment was relieved and sent home. On the 19th of November, he obtained his discharge, after having served nearly eight years, never having once been disgraced, confined, or reprimanded, and having attained, owing to his zeal and intelligence, the rank of sergeant-major without having passed through the intermediate rank of sergeant.

The following was the order issued at Portsmouth on the day of his discharge:

“Portsmouth, 19th Dec. 1791.

“Sergeant-Major Cobbett having most pressingly applied for his discharge, at Major Lord Edward Fitzgerald’s request, General Frederick has ordered Major Lord Edward Fitzgerald to return the Sergeant-Major thanks for his behaviour and conduct during the time of his being in the regiment, and Major Lord Edward adds his most hearty thanks to those of the General.”

III

At this period Cobbett married. Nobody has left us wiser sentiments or pithier sentences on the choice of a wife. His own, the daughter of a sergeant of artillery, stationed like himself at New Brunswick, had been selected at once. He had met her two or three times, and found her pretty; beauty, indeed, he considered indispensable, but beauty alone would never have suited him. Industry, activity, energy, the qualities which he possessed, were those which he most admired, and the partner of his life was fixed upon when he found her, one morning before it was distinctly light, “scrubbing out a washing-tub before her father’s door.” “That’s the girl for me,” he said, and he kept to this resolution with a fortitude which the object of his attachment deserved and imitated.

The courtship was continued, and the assurance of reciprocated affection given; but before the union of hands could sanctify that of hearts, the artillery were ordered home for England. Cobbett, whose regiment was then at some distance from the spot where his betrothed was still residing, unable to have the satisfaction of a personal farewell, sent her 150 guineas, the whole amount of his savings, and begged her to use it – as he feared her residence with her father at Woolwich might expose her to bad company – in making herself comfortable in a small lodging with respectable people until his arrival. It was not until four years afterwards that he himself was able to quit America, and he then found the damsel he had so judiciously chosen not with her father, it is true, nor yet lodging in idleness, but as servant-of-all-work for five pounds a year, and at their first interview she put into his hands the 150 guineas which had been confided to her – untouched. Such a woman had no ordinary force of mind; and it has been frequently asserted that he who, once beyond his own threshold, was ready to contend with every government in the world, was, when at home, under what has been appropriately called the government of the petticoat.

Cobbett’s marriage took place on the 3rd of February, 1792; that is, about ten weeks after his discharge; but having in March brought a very grave charge against some of the officers of his regiment, which charge, when a court-martial was summoned, he did not appear to support, he was forced to quit England for France, where he remained till September, 1792, when he determined on trying his fortune in the United States.

IV

On his arrival he settled in Philadelphia, and was soon joined by Mrs. Cobbett, who had not accompanied him out. His livelihood was at first procured by giving English lessons to French emigrants; and it is a fact not without interest that a celebrated person who figures amongst these sketches – M. de Talleyrand – wished to become one of his pupils. He refused, he says, to go to the ci-devant bishop’s house, but adds, in his usual style, that the lame fiend hopped over this difficulty at once by offering to come to his (Cobbett’s) house, an offer that was not accepted. About this time Doctor Priestley came to America. The enthusiasm with which the doctor was received roused the resentment of the British soldier, who moreover panted for a battle. He published then – though with some difficulty, booksellers objecting to the unpopularity of the subject, an objection at which the author was most indignant – a pamphlet called “Observations on Priestley’s Emigration.” This pamphlet, on account both of its ability and scurrility, made a sensation, and thus commenced the author’s reputation, though it only added 1s. 7½d. to his riches. But he was abusing, he was abused. This was to be in his element, and he rose at once, so far as the power and peculiarity of his style were concerned, to a foremost place amongst political writers. This style had been formed at an early period of life, and perhaps unconsciously to himself.

“At eleven years of age,” he says in an article in the Evening Post, calling upon the reformers to pay for returning him to Parliament, “my employment was clipping of box-edgings and weeding beds of flowers in the garden of the Bishop of Winchester at the castle of Farnham, my native town. I had always been fond of beautiful gardens, and a gardener who had just come from the King’s gardens at Kew gave me such a description of them as made me instantly resolve to work in those gardens. The next morning” (this is the early adventure I have previously spoken of), “without saying a word to any one, off I set, with no clothes except those upon my back, and with thirteen halfpence in my pocket. I found that I must go to Richmond, and I accordingly went on from place to place inquiring my way thither. A long day (it was in June) brought me to Richmond in the afternoon. Two pennyworth of bread and cheese and a pennyworth of small beer which I had on the road, and one halfpenny that I had lost somehow or other, left three pence in my pocket. With this for my whole fortune, I was trudging through Richmond in my blue smock-frock, and my red garters tied under my knees, when, staring about me, my eye fell upon a little book in a bookseller’s window, on the outside of which was written ‘The Tale of a Tub, price 3d.’ The title was so odd that my curiosity was excited. I had the threepence; but then I could not have any supper. In I went and got the little book, which I was so impatient to read, that I got over into a field at the upper corner of Kew Gardens, where there stood a haystack. On the shady side of this I sat down to read. The book was so different from anything that I had ever read before, it was something so new to my mind, that, though I could not understand some parts of it, it delighted me beyond description, and produced what I have always considered a sort of birth of intellect.

“I read on until it was dark without any thought of supper or bed. When I could see no longer, I put my little book in my pocket and tumbled down by the side of the stack, where I slept till the birds in the Kew Gardens awakened me in the morning, when off I started to Kew, reading my little book. The singularity of my dress, the simplicity of my manner, my lively and confident air, and doubtless his own compassion besides, induced the gardener, who was a Scotchman, I remember, to give me victuals, find me lodging, and set me to work; and it was during the period that I was at Kew that George IV. and two of his brothers laughed at the oddness of my dress while I was sweeping the grass-plot round the foot of the Pagoda. The gardener, seeing me fond of books, lent me some gardening books to read; but these I could not relish after my ‘Tale of a Tub,’ which I carried about with me wherever I went, and when I – at about twenty years old – lost it in a box that fell overboard in the Bay of Fundy, in North America, the loss gave me greater pain than I have since felt at losing thousands of pounds.”

V

Many had cause to remember, this evening passed under a haystack at Kew. The genius of Swift engrafted itself naturally on an intellect so clear and a disposition so inclined to satire as that of the gardener’s boy.

Cobbett’s earliest writings are more especially tinged with the colouring of his master. Take for instance the following fable, which will at all times find a ready application:

“In a pot-shop, well stocked with wares of all sorts, a discontented, ill-formed pitcher unluckily bore the sway. One day, after the mortifying neglect of several customers, ‘Gentlemen,’ said he, addressing himself to his brown brethren in general – ‘gentlemen, with your permission, we are a set of tame fools, without ambition, without courage, condemned to the vilest uses; we suffer all without murmuring; let us dare to declare ourselves, and we shall soon see the difference. That superb ewer, which, like us, is but earth – these gilded jars, vases, china, and, in short, all those elegant nonsenses whose colour and beauty have neither weight nor solidity – must yield to our strength and give place to our superior merit.’ This civic harangue was received with applause, and the pitcher, chosen president, became the organ of the assembly. Some, however, more moderate than the rest, attempted to calm the minds of the multitude; but all the vulgar utensils, which shall be nameless, were become intractable. Eager to vie with the bowls and the cups, they were impatient, almost to madness, to quit their obscure abodes to shine upon the table, kiss the lip, and ornament the cupboard.

“In vain did a wise water-jug – some say it was a platter – make them a long and serious discourse upon the utility of their vocation. ‘Those,’ said he, ‘who are destined to great employments are rarely the most happy. We are all of the same clay, ’tis true, but He who made us formed us for different functions; one is for ornament, another for use. The posts the least important are often the most necessary. Our employments are extremely different, and so are our talents.’

“This had a most wonderful effect; the most stupid began to open their ears; perhaps it would have succeeded, if a grease-pot had not cried out in a decisive tone: ‘You reason like an ass – to the devil with you and your silly lessons.’ Now the scale was turned again; all the horde of pans and pitchers applauded the superior eloquence and reasoning of the grease-pot. In short, they determined on an enterprise; but a dispute arose – who should be the chief? Every one would command, but no one obey. It was then you might have heard a clatter; all put themselves in motion at once, and so wisely and with so much vigour were their operations conducted, that the whole was soon changed – not into china, but into rubbish.”

VI

The tendency of this tale is manifest. It was in opposition to the democratic spirit mainly because such was the ruling spirit of the country in which the author had come to reside – a democratic spirit which has since developed itself more fully, but which then, though predominant, had a powerful and respectable party to contend against.

The constitution of the United States had indeed perfectly satisfied none of its framers. Franklin had declared that he consented to it, not as the best, but as the best that he could then hope for. Washington expressed the same opinion. It necessarily gave birth to two parties, which for a time were held together by the position, the abilities, and the reputation of the first president of the new Republic. They existed, however, in his government itself, where Jefferson represented the Democratic faction, and Hamilton the Federal or Conservative one. To the latter the president – though holding the balance with apparent impartiality – belonged; for he was an English gentleman, of a firm and moderate character, and, moreover, wished that the government of which he was the head should be possessed of an adequate force. The great movement, however, in France – which he was almost the only person to judge from the first with calm discernment – overbore his views and complicated his situation. Determined that the United States should take only a neutral position in the European contest, he was assailed on all sides – as a tyrant, because he wished for order – as a partisan of Great Britain, because he wished for peace. To those among the native Americans, who dreamt impossible theories, or desired inextricable confusion, were joined all the foreign intriguers, who, banished from their own countries, had no hopes of returning there but as enemies and invaders. “I am called everything,” said Washington, “even a Nero.”106 His continuance in the presidency, to which he was incited by some persons to pretend for a third time, had indeed become incompatible with his character and honour.

The respect which he had so worthily merited and so long inspired was on the wane. The cabinet with which he had commenced his government was broken up; his taxes, in some provinces, were refused; a treaty he had concluded with England was pretty generally condemned; and as he retired to Mount Vernon, the democratic party saw that approaching triumph which the election of their leader to the presidency was soon about to achieve. The cry against Great Britain was fiercer; the shout for Jefferson was louder than it had ever been before.

VII

At this time Cobbett, then better known as Peter Porcupine, a name which on becoming an author he had assumed, and which had at least the merit of representing his character appropriately, having quarrelled with a legion of booksellers, determined to set up in the bookselling line for himself; and in the spring of 1796, he took a house in Second Street for that purpose.

Though he was not so universally obnoxious then as he subsequently became, his enemies were already many and violent – his friends warm, but few. These last feared for him in the course he was entering upon; they advised him, therefore, to be prudent – to do nothing, at all events, on commencing business, that might attract public indignation; and, above all, not to put up any aristocratic portraits in his windows.

Cobbett’s plan was decided. His shop opened on a Monday, and he spent all the previous Sunday in so preparing it that, when he took down his shutters on the morning following, the people of Philadelphia were actually aghast at the collection of prints, arrayed in their defiance, including the effigies of George III., which had never been shown at any window since the rebellion. From that moment the newspapers were filled, and the shops placarded, with “A Blue Pill for Peter Porcupine,” “A Pill for Peter Porcupine,” “A Boaster for Peter Porcupine,” “A Picture of Peter Porcupine.” Peter Porcupine had become a person of decided consideration and importance.

“Dear father,” says the writer who had assumed this name, in one of his letters home, “when you used to set me off to work in the morning, dressed in my blue smock-frock and woollen spatterdashes, with a bag of bread and cheese and a bottle of small beer over my shoulder, on the little crook that my godfather gave me, little did you imagine that I should one day become so great a man.”

VIII

Paine’s arrival in America soon furnished fresh matter for invective. Paine, like Priestley, was a Republican; and was, like Priestley, hailed with popular enthusiasm by the Republicans. Cobbett attacked this new idol, therefore, as he had done the preceding one, and even with still greater virulence. This carried him to the highest pitch of unpopularity which it was possible to attain in the United States, and it was now certain that no opportunity would be lost of restraining his violence or breaking his pen. In August, 1797, accordingly, he was indicted for a libel against the Spanish minister and his court; but the bill was ignored by a majority of one; and indeed, it would have been difficult for an American jury to have punished an Englishman for declaring the Spanish king at that time “the tool of France.” A question was now raised as to whether the obnoxious writer should not be turned out of the United States, under the Alien Act.