presented by Cobbett,
had none of the bitter feeling against the nobility which smouldered
in the French peasantry. Cobbett looked back as fondly to the
surroundings of his youth as any nobleman could look back to Eton or
to his country mansion. He remembered the 'sweet country air' round
Crooksbury Hill, the song of birds, and the rambles through heather
and woodland. He loved the rough jovial sports; bull-baiting and
prize-fighting and single-stick play. He had followed the squire's
hounds on foot, and admired without jealousy the splendid gardens of
the bishop's palace at Farnham. Squire and parson were an intrinsic
part of the general order of things. The state of the English working
classes was, he often declares, the happiest that could be
imagined,[181] and he appeals in confirmation to his own memories.
Although, upon enlisting, he had found the army corrupt, he not only
loved the soldier for the rest of his life, but shared to the full the
patriotic exultation which welcomed the 1st of June and the Nile. Even
to the last, he could not stomach the abandonment of the title 'King
of France'; for so long as it was retained, it encouraged the farmer
to tell his son the story of Crecy and Agincourt.[182]

What, then, alienated Cobbett? Briefly, the degradation of the class
he loved. 'I wish,' he said, 'to see the poor men of England what the
poor men of England were when I was born, and from endeavouring to
accomplish this task, nothing but the want of means shall make me
desist.'[183] He had a right to make that boast, and his ardour in the
cause was as unimpeachable as honourable. It explains why Cobbett has
still a sympathetic side. He was a mass of rough human nature; no prig
or bundle of abstract formulae, like Paine and his Radical successors.
Logic with him is not in excess, but in defect. His doctrines are
hopelessly inconsistent, except so far as they represent his stubborn
prejudices. Any view will serve his purpose which can be made a weapon
of offence in his multitudinous quarrels. Cobbett, like the Radicals
of the time, was frightened by the gigantic progress of the debt. He
had advocated war; but the peasant who was accustomed to reckon his
income by pence, and had cried like a child when he lost the price of
a red herring, was alarmed by the reckless piling up of millions of
indebtedness. In 1806 he calmly proposed to his patron Windham to put
matters straight by repudiating the interest. 'The nation m