rd, and he himself is as impenetrable. One has
no notion of him as making use of a fine pen, but a great mutton-fist;
his style stuns his readers, and he 'fillips the ear of the public with
a three-man beetle.' He is too much for any single newspaper antagonist;
'lays waste' a city orator or Member of Parliament, and bears hard upon
the Government itself. He is a kind of _fourth estate_ in the politics
of the country. He is not only unquestionably the most powerful
political writer of the present day, but one of the best writers in the
language. He speaks and thinks plain, broad, downright English. He might
be said to have the clearness of Swift, the naturalness of Defoe,
and the picturesque satirical description of Mandeville; if all such
comparisons were not impertinent. A really great and original write
sense, Sterne was not a wit, nor Shakespear a poet. It is easy to
describe second-rate talents, because they fall into a class and enlist
under a standard; but first-rate powers defy calculation or comparison,
and can be defined only by themselves. They are _sui generis_, and
make the class to which they belong. I have tried half a dozen times
to describe Burke's style without ever succeeding,--its severe
extravagance; its literal boldness; its matter-of-fact hyperboles; its
running away with a subject, and from it at the same time,--but there
is no making it out, for there is no example of the same thing
anywhere else. We have no common measure to refer to; and his qualities
contradict even themselves.

Cobbett is not so difficult. He has been compared to Paine; and so far
it is true there are no two writers who come more into juxtaposition
from the nature of their subjects, from the internal resources on which
they draw, and from the popular effect of their writings and their
adaptation (though that is a bad word in the present case) to the
capacity of every reader. But still if we turn to a volume of Paine's
(his _Common Sense_ or _Rights of Man_) we are struck (not to say
somewhat refreshed) by the difference. Paine is a much more sententious
writer than Cobbett. You cannot open a page in any of his best and
earlier works without meeting with some maxim, some antithetical and
memorable saying, which is a sort of starting-place for the argument,
and the goal to which it returns. There is not a single _bon mot_, a
single sentence in Cobbett that has ever been quoted again. If anything
is ever quoted from him, it is