last found, the balance of every sentence and perfect harmony of the whole work—­to go from it to the simple vigorous unadorned talk of Rural Rides.  A classic, and as incongruous among classics as a farmer in his smock-frock, leggings, and stout boots would appear in a company of fine gentlemen in fashionable dress.  The powerful face is the main thing, and we think little of the frock and leggings and how the hair is parted or if parted at all.  Harsh and crabbed as his nature no doubt was, and bitter and spiteful at times, his conversation must yet have seemed like a perpetual feast of honeyed sweets to his farmer friend.  Doubtless there was plenty of variety in it:  now he would expatiate on the beauty of the green downs over which he had just ridden, the wooded slopes in their glorious autumn colours, and the rich villages between; this would remind him of Malthus, that blasphemous monster who had dared to say that the increase in food production did not keep pace with increase of population; then a quieting down, a breathing-space, all about the turnip crop, the price of eggs at Weyhill Fair, and the delights of hare coursing, until politics would come round again and a fresh outburst from the glorious demagogue in his tantrums.

At eight o’clock Cobbett would say good night and go to bed, and early next morning write down what he had said to his friend, or some of it, and send it off to be printed in his paper.  That, I take it, is how Rural Rides was written, and that is why it seems so fresh to us to this day, and that to take it up after other books is like going out from a luxurious room full of fine company into the open air to feel the wind and rain on one’s face and see the green grass.  But I very much regret that Cobbett tells us nothing of his farmer friend.  Blount, I imagine, must have been a man of a very fine character to have won the heart and influenced such a person.  Cobbett never loses an opportunity of vilifying the parsons and expressing his hatred of the Established Church; and yet, albeit a Protestant, he invariably softens down when he refers to the Roman Catholic faith and appears quite capable of seeing the good that is in it.

It was Blount, I think, who had soothed the savage breast of the man in this matter.  The only thing I could hear about Blount and his “queer notions” regarding the land was his idea that the soil could be improved by taking the flints out.  “The soil to look upon,” Cobbett truly says, “appears to be more than half flint, but is a very good quality.”  Blount thought to make it better, and for many years employed all the aged poor villagers and the children in picking the flints from the ploughed land and gathering them in vast heaps.  It does not appear that he made his land more productive, but his hobby was a good one for the poor of the village; the stones, too, proved useful afterwards to the road-makers, who have been using them these many years.  A few heaps almost clothed over with a turf which had formed on them in the course of eighty years were still to be seen on the land when I was there.