time, and of _Fraser_ in 1830.

It was a matter of course that in the direction or on the staff of these
new periodicals some of the veterans of the older system, or of the men
who had at any rate already some experience in journalism, should be
enlisted. Gifford, the first editor of the _Quarterly_, was in all
respects a writer of the old rather than of the new age. Southey had at
one time wholly, and for years partly, supported himself by writing for
periodicals; Coleridge was at different times not merely a contributor
to these, but an actual daily journalist; and so with others. But, as
always happens when a really new development of literature takes place,
new regiments raised themselves to carry out the new tactics, as it
were, spontaneously. Many of the great names and the small mentioned in
the last three chapters--perhaps indeed most of them--took the
periodical shilling at one time or other in their lives. But those whom
I shall now proceed to mention--William Cobbett, Francis Jeffrey, Sydney
Smith, John Wilson, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt as a prose writer, William
Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey, John Gibson Lockhart, and some others--were,
if not exactly journalists (an incorrect, but the only single
designation), at any rate such frequent contributors to periodical
literature of one kind or another that in some cases nothing, in most
comparatively little, would be left of their work if contributions to
newspapers, reviews, and magazines were to be excluded from it.

William Cobbett, not the greatest, but the most singular and original of
the group, with the exception of Lamb, and as superior to Lamb in
fertility and massive vigour as he was inferior to him in exquisite
delicacy and finish, was the son of a very small farmer little above the
labouring rank, and was born near Farnham in 1762. He was first a
ploughboy, next an attorney's clerk, and then he enlisted in the 24th
regiment. He served very creditably for seven or eight years, became
serjeant-major, improved himself very much in education, and obtained
his discharge. But, by one of the extraordinary freaks which mark his
whole career, he first took it into his head to charge the officers of
his regiment with malversation, and then ran away from his own charge
with his newly married wife, first to France and then to America. Here
he stayed till the end of the century, and here he began his newspaper
experiments, keeping up in _Peter Porcupine's Journal_ a v