SOURCE: "Purified Talk," in Selected Essays and Critical Writings, edited by Herbert Read and Denis Saurat, Stanley Nott, 1935, pp. 23-4.

Orage was an English editor, reviewer, and essayist who edited the influential periodical New Age from 1907 to 1922. In 1932 he founded the New English Weekly, which he edited until his death two years later. In the following essay, he praises the simplicity and naturalness of Cobbett's prose.

Cobbett does not deserve what Green says of him, that he was 'the greatest tribune the English poor ever possessed'. Cobbett had not sufficient appreciation of the real enemy of the English poor, and it is safe to say of his projects of reform, as of so many others, that if they could all have been carried, the English poor would have remained the English poor. A much more lasting effect and testimony to his tribuneship is to be found in his...