We wander with him through cornfields, and meadows, and homesteads, and seem to catch the very fragrance of the new-mown hay or the long lush grass; to hear the creaking of the loaded waggons and the song of the harvest home; to catch the sound of the flail and the cackle of the poultry, as we pass by the snug farm-house encircled by its belt of ricks; and to scent the dank dead leaves in the midst of woodland glades such as greet us in the canvas of Linnell. It was in these years too that he wrote his History of the Protestant Reformation, which, wrongheaded as it may be in numerous particulars, is written in a style which rivets our attention to the book, and carries us along with the author in spite of the mental protest which we all along endeavour to maintain. Take the following passage, for instance :

Look at the cloister, now

Go to the site of some once opulent convent. become, in the hands of a rack-renter, the receptacle for dung, fodder, and faggot wood: see the hall, where for ages the widow, the orphan, the aged, and the stranger found a table ever spread: see a bit of its walls now helping to make a cattle shed, the rest having been hauled away to build a workhouse: recognise, in the side of a barn, a part of a once magnificent chapel; and if, chained to the spot by your melancholy musings, you be admonished of the approach of night by the voice of the screech owl, issuing from those arches, which once, at the same hour, resounded with the vespers of the monk, and which have for seven hundred years been assailed by storms and tempests in vain: if thus admonished of the necessity of seeking food, shelter, and a bed-lift your eyes and look at the white-washed and dry-rotten shell on the hill, called the "gentleman's house," and, apprised of the "board wages and the spring guns, suddenly turn your head, jog away from the scene of devastation, with "Old English Hospitality" in your mind; reach the nearest inn, and there, in a room half lighted and half warmed, and with reception precisely proportioned to the length of your purse, sit down and listen to an account of the hypocritical pretences, the base motives, the tyrannical and bloody means, under which, from which, and by which that devastation was effected, and that hospitality banished for ever from the land.

This is passionate and persuasive rhetoric. Yet we cannot help suspecting that had Cobbett lived in those days he would have been a sharper thorn in the sides of these venerable brethren then than he was even in the sides of their despoilers. As some men speak, so do others write, very much above themselves: that is to say, with a degree of excellence out of all proportion to the general range of their abilities. Such a man was Cobbett; and finding the effect which he created by his writings, he became puffed up with the most unconscionable sense of his own importance. Lord Macaulay, to compare great things with small, was a man of whom it may equally be said that Materiem superabat opus, and his fascinating style has made much miserable logic, and much erroneous narrative, pass muster as undeniable truth. At a long interval, Cobbett resembled him. His style was just as fascinating to one class of readers as Macaulay's to another; and truth and error were mixed in about equal proportions in the writings of both. But in Cobbett there are inconsistencies and absurdities into which the better trained mind of

Lord Macaulay never betrayed him he is, in fact, a mass of contradictions. He thought highly of the feudal system, and regretted the expulsion of the Stuarts; yet he abused Sir Walter Scott's poems, which had done so much to rescue both from obloquy. We have seen him scolding Mr. Pitt for his preference of low men; reminding the English people of the virtues of the old country gentry, and lamenting the disappearance of the ancient families before the Ricardos, the Peels, and the Barings. Yet elsewhere we find him denouncing with all his energy the principle of "birth" and the belief that there could be any virtue in long descent. Now he complains that the land has been so heavily burdened that the ancient proprietors have been ruined; and now that it has escaped from its just liabilities, accepted with the original grants. At one time of his life he abhorred Parliamentary Reform and all who recommended it; and within a very few years, not more than five or six, he declared it to be the only thing which could save the country, and its champions the only men who deserved the confidence of the people. At one time the Church of England was a venerable and beneficent institution, against which it was sacrilege to raise a little finger; at another it was a selfish and dishonest sect, battening on the ill-gotten gains which it had come by at the Reformation. Cobbett was the friend of Pitt, and he quarrelled with Pitt. He was the friend of Windham, and he quarrelled with Windham. He was the friend of Sir Francis Burdett, and he quarrelled with Sir Francis Burdett. But perhaps the most extraordinary instance of inconsistency, or as it is often called "tergiversation," which his writings supply, is afforded by the contrast between the Considerations for the people of England on the renewal of the war in 1803, to which we have already referred, and an article in the Political Register in 1807, in which he declaims against those who have fomented this terror of the French in terms which, had he been a serious instead of a comic satirist, Sydney Smith might have envied. Another very curious instance of the same infirmity, and drawn from a totally different subject matter, is the advice which he gives to young men never to trifle with the affections of a young woman, combined with the obvious fact that he himself did trifle with the affections of a young woman in America to a culpable extent, and that he tells the story of it in the same book, not indeed without some self-reproach, but with a degree of contrition wholly inadequate to the offence.

Cobbett was a keen observer of facts, and an acute reasoner on all that came immediately before his eyes. On all such questions he formed opinions corresponding to the strength of his character. But they had no roots in the soil, and faded one after another, to be replaced by new ones of a like transitory nature. He was able, from personal experience, to contrast the condition of the agricultural labourer in the beginning of the nineteenth century with what he remembered it in the middle of the eighteenth. And on this subject he is always to be trusted, and his

opinion never changed. He saw, too-what of course was equally undeniable that the feudal system and the monastic system had saved the necessity of taxes and poor rates; and, delighted with his discovery, as a self-educated man naturally would be, he never paused to inquire what still greater evils had attached to these systems. The charges brought against the monks he dismisses with a sneer at the Church of England, and the abuses of feudalism are apparently beneath his notice. In the two systems he had got exactly what he wanted-a theme for declamation and picturesque description, and a field for the indulgence alike of his utilitarian and his imaginative tendencies. But when he came to the remedy for his wrongs, he either drifted from one idea to another, as the current of events bore him, or he merely expressed more violently what hundreds of other people were saying more moderately. His views on the currency and the Corn Laws, and peculation and corruption, were not peculiar to himself, though he was very anxious to have it thought so. It is matter for regret that his egregious vanity, his habitual boastfulness, and the exaggerated violence of his language (babbling slave-filthy scribbler-ferocious tiger-were among the mildest epithets he applied to everyone who differed from him)—should have combined to create a really erroneous impression of the man during his lifetime, and to perpetuate it after his death. There is no reason to doubt that Sir John Malcolm's account of his journey with him from Birmingham to Manchester, in 1832, is a perfectly correct narrative; and it certainly shows Cobbett in most offensive and most pitiable colours. It has been said, and probably with truth, that he owed many of both his good and bad qualities to Swift, for whose character and writing he never lost his early admiration, from the day when he spent his last threepence in buying the Tale of a Tub, which he read supperless under a haystack. Both suffered in their youth some wrongs at the hands of the great; and both, perhaps, entered public life with some bitterness of spirit. With the directness and simplicity of Swift's style, it is quite possible that Cobbett caught something both of his coarseness, and of his boisterous and bustling self-importance; but on the better, and gentler, and more poetic side of his character, he reminds one of another great writer with whom he has never been compared, and of whom he seems never to have heard. Both were born to the plough: both were Jacobites and Radicals and both learned to write their mother tongue with a force and fire which has made them famous for ever. A really attentive study of Cobbett's works and character will persuade most people that I am guilty of no profanity in suggesting his resemblance to Burns. In conclusion: when we cast our eye back over his long life-consider what he was, what he suffered, and what he accomplished-we shall find some excuse for even his worst faults; while we shall admire still more the abilities which, in spite of these obstacles, bore him into the front rank of English prose writers.

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The Revolution and the Stage in France.

WHETHER the dull and prosaic House of Hanover gave but little state support to the theatre, or whether it be that the Puritan triumph in the Revolution was even more complete and enduring than is generally supposed, it is certain that for some two centuries the stage has played a much less important part in English public life than in French. Even now, there is usually some political play among the bones of contention in Parisian society-for example, the two latest original plays brought out at the Français, L'Ami Fritz and Jean Dacier, awoke great discussion on political and very little on literary grounds; and the success of Sardou's brilliant Rabagas is not yet forgotten-nor forgiven.

It

And as the struggles of to-day are calm compared with the fight to the death of the first Revolution, we may expect that even Rabagas did not hit so hard as some of its predecessors of eighty years ago. seems, perhaps, strange that English writers on French history have taken so little notice of the part played by the stage in the crisis of the first great series of struggles-say from 1789 to 1795; but their neglect is no doubt due to the fact that in England the influence and use of the theatre have for a very long time been underrated by serious writers. A revolution in a country where the drama is a power is sure to be heralded, and to be fought for and against, on the stage; and if it were not so in our English revolution, it was that the actors were all, and naturally, banded against the friends and supporters of Prynne, were crushed when the Parliament won, and earlier in the struggle could perhaps hardly have added to the constant ridicule and abuse. which they had long poured upon "citizens" and Puritans—as distinguished from fine Court gentlemen.

In France it was different. Not only were the grumblings which preceded the final crash echoed in the comedies of the latter half of the eighteenth century-it has often been said the Revolution began in the Mariage de Figaro - but there exists a distinct revolutionary theatre: the Charles LX and Tibère of Marie-Joseph Chénier, L'Ami des Lois of Laya, Le Vous et le Toi of Aristide Valcour, and very many other pieces of greater or less importance; and each party thought it necessary more than once to put down with a high hand such demonstrations of its opponents. It is most interesting to notice how the thin line

* A collection of the most characteristic of these works has just been published by M. Louis Moland. Many curious facts which I shall quote are taken from it, as are most of the plays I shall criticise.

of political plays follows the stream of popular thought, allying itself as a rule, with the side of humanity, whether that side be for the moment protesting against the oppression of kings, or the unmeasured cruelty of their destroyers; though now and again it becomes the mouthpiece of popular passion freed from its cruel chains, or the expression of the contempt felt even by the poorest honest folk for the scum of parvenus who (and it was only natural) rivalled the vices of the aristocrats and burlesqued their follies. Every bend in the course of the stream is indicated by these odd little works of a rather tawdry art, which have not yet altogether sunk, but may indicate to us where the currents raged most fiercely. Take the plays in M. Moland's well-chosen collection. Kings are schooled in Charles IX; the downfall of the priestly power is hailed with triumph in Les Victimes Cloitrées; the misgivings of the Girondists find a voice in L'Ami des Lois; a yell of exultation at the punishment of tyranny rises from Le Jugement Dernier des Rois; L'Intérieur des Comités Révolutionnaires is a breath of relief after a briefer but even more terrible oppression; and lastly, in Madame Angot, quieter times returning, plain citizens are able to enjoy a laugh at those of their fellows whose sudden rise to prosperity has turned their heads.

A fair idea of what was the influence of the stage at this period, its nature and extent, can hardly be given more briefly or more effectively than by sketching these few representative plays, their character, the circumstances of their production, and their reception by the public, and by the successive governments of the time. Of their literary merits it will naturally not be needful to say much-one does not expect in pièces de circonstance great polish of dialogue or care in construction. Perhaps, however, the plays are, on the whole, rather better than one would be inclined to expect. The author of Charles IX was of course a man of high and genuine culture-the brother of perhaps the most classical poet France has ever produced. Les Victimes Cloîtrées is quite up to the average of melodramas-in conception of character even rises above it; and in both L'Intérieur des Comités Révolutionnaires and Madame Angot there is genuine humour. Great originality, of course, one does not look for in such pieces; and it is quite as well that one should not. It is noticeable that not one of these plays is by a dramatist of any note—even Chénier hardly enters the second rank of French tragedians.

Without more preface, then, let me give some description of each of these very different dramas, taking them in the chronological order already given, rejecting the consideration of others of their kind, not that they lack interest, but that a selection must be made, and that these seem the most fully illustrative of the different phases of the Revolution. Speaking very roughly, they may be said to represent the views of one or other party during the periods when Mirabeau, Danton, Marat, Robespierre, and the Directory were in power. When the first,