As for the latest example I have selected, it is a crucial one.  The Letters of Malachi Malagrowther come from a man who is not often rated high as a political thinker, even by those who sympathise with his political views.  But here as elsewhere the politician, no less than the poet, the critic, the historian, bears the penalty of the pre-eminent greatness of the novelist.  Nothing is more uncritical than to regard Scott as a mere sentimentalist in politics, and I cannot think that any competent judge can do so after reading Malagrowther, even after reading Scott’s own Diary and letters on the subject.  As he there explains, he was not greatly carried, as a rule, to interest himself in the details of politics.  As both Lockhart and he admit, he might not have been so interested even at this juncture had it not been for the chagrin at his own misfortunes, which, nobly and stoically repressed as it was, required some issue.  But his general principle on this occasion was clear; it can be thoroughly apprehended and appreciated even by an Englishman of Englishmen.  It was thoroughly justified by the event, and, I may perhaps be permitted to observe, ran exactly contrary to a sentiment rather widely adopted of late.  No man, whether in public writings or private conduct, could be more set than Scott was against a spurious Scotch particularism.  He even earned from silly Scots maledictions for the chivalrous justice he dealt to England in The Lord of the Isles, and the common-sense justice he dealt to her in the mouth of Bailie Jarvie.  But he was not more staunch for the political Union than he was for the preservation of minor institutions, manners, and character; and the proposed interference with Scotch banking seemed to him to be one of the things tending to make good Scotchmen, as he bluntly told Croker, ’damned mischievous Englishmen.’  Therefore he arose and spoke, and though he averted the immediate attempt, yet the prophecies which he uttered were amply fulfilled in other ways after the Reform Bill.

These, then, are the principles on which I have selected the pieces that follow (some minor reasons for the particular choices being given in the special introductions):—­That they should be pamphlets proper (Malachi appeared first in a newspaper, but that was a sign of the time chiefly, and the numbers of Cobbett’s Register were practically independent pieces); that they should deal with special subjects of burning political, and not merely personal, interest; and that they should either directly or in the long-run have exercised an actual determining influence on the course of politics and history.  This last point is undoubted in the case of the examples from Halifax, Swift, Burke (who more than any one man pointed and steeled the resistance of England to Jacobin tyranny), and Scott; it was less immediate, but scarcely more dubious in those of Defoe, Cobbett, and Sydney Smith.  And so in all humility I make my bow as introducer once more to the English public of these Seven Masters of English political writing.