SOURCE: "William Cobbett," in English Portraits and Essays, Hodder and Stoughton, 1924, pp. 61-86.

In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in the London Mercury in 1921, Freeman surveys Cobbett's career and his reputation among his contemporaries.

Born in 1762 at Farnham (Surrey) in a house upon which amused and affectionate eyes may, I think, still fall; guiltless of any enforced education other than lessons at a dame's school and, on winter evenings, from his father at home; walking to London when he was about thirteen and spending his last coppers on A Tale of a Tub by that earlier pamphleteer whose more powerful and sombre genius was to vivify his own; enlisting in a lawyer's office and then in that scarcely more unconscionable school, His Majesty's Army; serving in that Army until 1791, and all the while plucking (or was it not, in a common soldier, poaching?) grammar, French...