he was ready to uproot ancient successes, and he was ready to defy oncoming doom.  Burke said that few are the partisans of a tyranny that has departed:  he might have added that fewer still are the critics of a tyranny that has remained.  Burke certainly was not one of them.  While lashing himself into a lunacy against the French Revolution, which only very incidentally destroyed the property of the rich, he never criticised (to do him justice, perhaps never saw) the English Revolution, which began with the sack of convents, and ended with the fencing in of enclosures; a revolution which sweepingly and systematically destroyed the property of the poor.  While rhetorically putting the Englishman in a castle, politically he would not allow him on a common.  Cobbett, a much more historical thinker, saw the beginning of Capitalism in the Tudor pillage and deplored it; he saw the triumph of Capitalism in the industrial cities and defied it.  The paradox he was maintaining really amounted to the assertion that Westminster Abbey is rather more national than Welbeck Abbey.  The same paradox would have led him to maintain that a Warwickshire man had more reason to be proud of Stratford-on-Avon than of Birmingham.  He would no more have thought of looking for England in Birmingham than of looking for Ireland in Belfast.

The prestige of Cobbett’s excellent literary style has survived the persecution of his equally excellent opinions.  But that style also is underrated through the loss of the real English tradition.  More cautious schools have missed the fact that the very genius of the English tongue tends not only to vigour, but specially to violence.  The Englishman of the leading articles is calm, moderate, and restrained; but then the Englishman of the leading articles is a Prussian.  The mere English consonants are full of Cobbett.  Dr. Johnson was our great man of letters when he said “stinks,” not when he said “putrefaction.”  Take some common phrase like “raining cats and dogs,” and note not only the extravagance of imagery (though that is very Shakespearean), but a jagged energy in the very spelling.  Say “chats” and “chiens” and it is not the same.  Perhaps the old national genius has survived the urban enslavement most spiritedly in our comic songs, admired by all men of travel and continental culture, by Mr. George Moore as by Mr. Belloc.  One (to which I am much attached) had a chorus—­

  “O wind from the South
  Blow mud in the mouth
  Of Jane, Jane, Jane.”

Note, again, not only the tremendous vision of clinging soils carried skywards in the tornado, but also the suitability of the mere sounds.  Say “bone” and “bouche” for mud and mouth and it is not the same.  Cobbett was a wind from the South; and if he occasionally seemed to stop his enemies’ mouths with mud, it was the real soil of South England.