And as his seemingly mad language is very literary, so his seemingly mad meaning is very historical.  Modern people do not understand him because they do not understand the difference between exaggerating a truth and exaggerating a lie.  He did exaggerate, but what he knew, not what he did not know.  He only appears paradoxical because he upheld tradition against fashion.  A paradox is a fantastic thing that is said once:  a fashion is a more fantastic thing that is said a sufficient number of times.  I could give numberless examples in Cobbett’s case, but I will give only one.  Anyone who finds himself full in the central path of Cobbett’s fury sometimes has something like a physical shock.  No one who has read “The History of the Reformation” will ever forget the passage (I forget the precise words) in which he says the mere thought of such a person as Cranmer makes the brain reel, and, for an instant, doubt the goodness of God; but that peace and faith flow back into the soul when we remember that he was burned alive.  Now this is extravagant.  It takes the breath away; and it was meant to.  But what I wish to point out is that a much more extravagant view of Cranmer was, in Cobbett’s day, the accepted view of Cranmer; not as a momentary image, but as an immovable historical monument.  Thousands of parsons and penmen dutifully set down Cranmer among the saints and martyrs; and there are many respectable people who would do so still.  This is not an exaggerated truth, but an established lie.  Cranmer was not such a monstrosity of meanness as Cobbett implies; but he was mean.  But there is no question of his being less saintly than the parsonages believed; he was not a saint at all; and not very attractive even as a sinner.  He was no more a martyr for being burned than Crippen for being hanged.

Cobbett was defeated because the English people was defeated.  After the frame-breaking riots, men, as men, were beaten:  and machines, as machines, had beaten them.  Peterloo was as much the defeat of the English as Waterloo was the defeat of the French.  Ireland did not get Home Rule because England did not get it.  Cobbett would not forcibly incorporate Ireland, least of all the corpse of Ireland.  But before his defeat Cobbett had an enormous following; his “Register” was what the serial novels of Dickens were afterwards to be.  Dickens, by the way, inherited the same instinct for abrupt diction, and probably enjoyed writing “gas and gaiters” more than any two other words in his works.  But Dickens was narrower than Cobbett, not by any fault of his own, but because in the intervening epoch of the triumph of Scrooge and Gradgrind the link with our Christian past had been lost, save in the single matter of Christmas, which Dickens rescued romantically and by a hair’s-breadth escape.  Cobbett was a yeoman; that is, a man free and farming a small estate.  By Dickens’s time, yeomen seemed as antiquated as bowmen.  Cobbett was mediaeval; that is, he was in almost every way the opposite of