SOURCE: "An Englishman," in Essays on Literature, History, Politics, Etc., Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1927, pp. 26-30.

Woolf is best known as one of the leaders of the Bloomsbury Group of artists and thinkers, and as the husband of novelist Virginia Woolf with whom he founded the Hogarth Press. A Fabian socialist during the World War I era, he became a regular contributor to the socialist New Statesman and later served as literary editor of the Nation and the Athenaeum, in which much of his literary criticism is found In the following essay, originally published in 1923 in the Nation and the Athenaeum, he focuses on Rural Rides in discussing Cobbett's contributions to England's cultural and literary history.

Cobbett's Rural Rides and selections from his writings have been recently published for use in schools. I hope that this means that there is a revival in the appreciation of Cobbett. Nations, like...