according to Cobbett, was plain. The Church was the creation of the Tudor Parliaments, and the revenues came from the systematic plundering of the Reformation. The poor man's share of the tithes had been already partly appropriated by monasterics, and the revenues of the monasteries had been grabbed by the favourites of those brutal tyrants, Henry VIII. and Elizabeth. A married clergy meanwhile was bringing up its families on the incomes which should have been devoted in part to the same end. Briefly, this fat, lazy band of pluralists, sinecurists, and bloated bishops was fattening on funds belonging of right to the agricultural labourer.

That was Cobbett's doctrine, of which I need not discuss the value Anyhow, he put it with immense energy, and, though his research was shallow enough, he showed no little shrewdness and sense of the true ends of history. He took, of course, the narrow view of a great revolution. A journalist who makes the Pitt and Canning of his own time responsible for all the evils of the day naturally attributes all the evils of the past to a Henry VIII. and a Thomas Cromwell. He was unable to gauge the general significance of vast historical processes, of which even the Reformation was only one symptom. And yet, of the many writers who have said the same thing since, I think that few have said better than Cobbett how important it is to make history more than a mere biography of kings and generals. It is, he says, of little more use to read about battles and intrigues than to read a romance. The important thing is to ascertain the state of the people in the past. To do that. compare the price of labour with the price of food. You hear enough of the glorious wars of Edward III.-not too much, he adds, for he could never forget that King of France business; but historians don't condescend to tell you that in those days a common labourer earned threepence-halfpenny a day, while a fat sheep was sold for one shilling and twopence, and a fat goose for twopence-halfpenny; that old women got a penny a day for haymaking, and that a gallon of red wine was sold for fourpence. Cobbett's facts may often be disputable. He had only glanced at a few Acts of Parliament or taken them at second-hand. He argued persistently and with some ingenuity, that the population of England had been as great in the Middle Ages as in his own time; and when some of his conclusions were dispersed by the census he thought it a sufficient answer to call the returning officers monstrous liars. he insisted upon facts which have rightly received more attention of late. He dimly saw what Thorold Rogers' work has made familiar-the pros

But

perous state of the labourer in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; and I may add that Rogers coincides curiously in some of his views. with other positions maintained by Cobbett. Rogers could himself be only a pioneer in a most important field of inquiry, and Cobbett cer-tainly deserves the credit of having very distinctly pointed to the great importance of such researches.

Cobbett's whole position rests on the same sentiment. He is one continuous protest against the degradation of the agricultural labourer. His history, his politics, his economic theories, so far as they are not mere journalism for the moment, have no other aim. It is the centre of all his thoughts. Nor could anyone speak with stronger common-sense. No one pointed out more clearly how the system of paying wages partly out of the rates injured the pauper; how the labourer came to reckon the parish chest among his ways and means; hid his carnings to cheat the parish; and lost all his old horror of dependence. Charity, he says, is a premium on hypocrisy. His own labourers were what some people called "saucy"; he liked them "saucy"; they were what Englishmen should be; they gave him labour and took his money, and there was no obligation either way. He never employed a pauper but he gave good wages, and paid them all the year round. He acted, he says, not from charity, but for his own interest. One of his men was worth two or three half-famished paupers. The first thing to be done, he says, is to encourage the labourer to be honest and truthful. To be honest and truthful "he must have his bellyful and be free from fear;. and his bellyful must come from his wages and not from benevolence." A labourer's cottage, he said, on a Sunday, with husband or wife carrying a baby and two or three elder children playing in the garden, is the "most interesting object that eyes ever beheld," to which this John Bull adds that it can only be seen in England. He once met such a party by a cottage in Sussex, and asked the father how many children. he expected to have. "I don't care how many," was the reply; "God never sends mouths without sending food." "Did you never hear of Parson Malthus?" asked Cobbett, and proceeded to explain that gentleman's theories, to the amazement of the couple, who had five children though the wife was only twenty-two. That is the genuine Cobbett. Nobody could tell more plainly the demoralising effects of the Poor Law; but when it came to remedying the abuses his old vein of sentimentalism came to the surface. Malthus, in particular, evoked his bitterest hatred. The phrase," surplus population "-a favourite with the Malthusians

always rouses him to fury. There was not, and could not be, and never had been, a surplus population, let census gatherers say what they pleased. All that really happened was a drain from the country to the monstrous wen, which was already, as he observes in 1822, prolonging its hideous arms six or seven miles along the road to Cambridge. The economists were humbugs. One number of his "twopenny trash was worth all that Adam Smith ever wrote. And, therefore, when a real reform of the Poor Laws was proposed, Cobbett was its bitterest enemy; abused Scottish "feelosophers," as he called them, and Mill and MacCulloch and the stockjobbing Ricardo, and the paper which he pleasantly calls "the bloody old Times," for it was one of the favourite tenets of this peculiar Radical that the Press was on the whole (wholly, indeed, with the exception of the Register) a mischievous institution and one of the numerous instruments of corruption at the disposal of the "Thing."

Cobbett's alliance with the Radicals was thus always superficial. To them the freedom of industry, the encouragement of manufactures, and of the growth of capital were the great ends, and if they attacked the aristocracy, they objected to the ancient system, not to the new aristocracy of wealth. They shared the prejudices of the commercial and the middle classes. Cobbett's sentiment was entirely different. In his early period, he adopted a phrase attributed (though wrongly, it seems) to Windham, " Perish Commerce." Not, of course, that he objected to commerce in itself; but he held that all the real wealth of the country came from the land; and he defended the war on the ground that we could lose little by a destruction of trade, which was after all of doubtful benefit. In speaking of the capitalist he uses language which might commend itself to some of our Socialist friends. What, he asks, is capital? It is "money taken from the labouring classes, which being given to army tailors and such like, enables them to keep fox-hounds and trace their descent from the Normans." To Cobbett, in short, the existing order was bad, but for the ideal order which was to replace it he looked backwards. The stockjobber, not the old noble, was the real enemy. The Socialist Owen said much the same. Cobbett's pet political project was the destruction of the debt, and therefore, as he thought, of excessive taxation and of the whole machinery by which the stockjobber lived upon the poor man. The old days of Crécy and Agincourt, the times when the labourer could buy a fat goose for his day's work, was the true period of English glory and happiness.

He looked back through that mirage of boyish happiness which makesso many of us fancy that the world grows worse as we grow older. He repeats in his later years the wish which I have before quoted, the desire to restore to the "labouring classes that happiness which in my youth I saw them enjoy and enjoyed with them." That Cobbett felt that wish so sincerely is his true title to our good will; his expression of it in manydetached passages and the light which it infuses into his account of country scenery, gives a fascination to some of his writings, the Rural Rides in particular, which is not quenched even though it is set in the midst of reckless declamation and bewildered ravings and brutal abuse of men and things which he only half understood. To the last, he is. still at bottom the hearty, jovial countryman, coarse-mouthed, and too. often a mere blatant demagogue, and yet with a certain genial breath of emphatic, full-blooded enjoyment of the good things of the world, the homely affections of commonplace mankind, which we cannot help. recognising.

Two people have left descriptions of Cobbett which may complete his picture. Miss Mitford was at Botley about 1806-7; she saw the jolly British yeoman, an English version of Dandie Dinmont, in a big. farmhouse, where he could accommodate a dozen guests, clergymen,. politicians, and men of letters. She never saw heartier hospitality.. He gathered his neighbours for country games-wrestling, cudgel playing, and running; his gardens were full of flowers and fruit;. and everything was jovial and pleasant, till some explosion of prejudice produced a little social tempest, without which Cobbett could hardly be complete. A greater writer visited England in Cobbett's later days. "Old Cobbett," says Heine, "English bulldog, I don't love you ;. every vulgar nature is revolting to me, but I pity you in my deepest soul, when I see you unable to break your chain and reach the thieves · (the Thing,' that is) who carry off their booty before your eyes and. mock at your impotent howls." Put the two pictures together, and we have the two sides of Cobbett. Would you, I wonder, rather be theman of exquisite genius, nailed down in later years to his bed of misery and suffering the penalty of overwrought nerves, or this huge British. bulldog, who had no nerves at all, and, if genius, a genius of the common-place kind, who blustered and bullied his way through the world, enjoyed himself to the end, and stood so firmly on his feet that all the abuse of the "Thing" and its slaves appeared to him to be nothing but an. involuntary testimony to his superlative merits?

LESLIE STEPHEN.

A

IN DEFENCE OF CLASSICAL STUDY.*

T the beginning of the century classical studies, as pursued in our schools and universities, rested on a tradition, dating from the sixteenth century, which had never been effectively challenged, even by those whom it failed to satisfy. And yet the humanities, salutary as their influence had been in the higher education, powerful as they had been in helping to shape individual minds and characters, did not then possess much hold on the literary and intellectual life of the country at large. Even among those who had profited most by them there were perhaps few who, if they had been called upon to defend the humanistic tradition, could have done so in a manner which we should now regard as adequate. At the present day, on the other hand, the classics share the domain of liberal culture with a large number of other subjects whose importance is universally recognised; controversies have raged around them; but at any rate, wherever classical studies are carried to an advanced point, the students can now give good reasons for their faith. That spirit which the classics embody now animates the higher literature of the country to a greater extent than at any previous time in the history of English letters. Moreover, an intelligent interest in the great masterpieces of ancient literature and art is far more widely diffused than it ever was before in England.

It is worth while to trace, however briefly, the process by which this change has been effected. The latter part of the eighteenth century was the time at which the distinctive qualities of the old Greek genius began to be truly appreciated by moderns: this was due chiefly to such men as Lessing and Winckelmann in the province of art, to Goethe and Schiller in literature. Meanwhile the Romantic school had arisen, seeking an ideal, but recoiling from the Latin classicism hitherto prevalent, and seeking refuge in the Middle Ages. The Romanticists had little sympathy with the Greek desire for light and clearness; they were more

An Address delivered at Mason College, Birmingham, on October 9th, 1893.