omething new and good, manly and simple, not
the same insipid story of self over again. We sit down at table with
the writer, but it is to a course of rich viands, flesh, fish, and
wild-fowl, and not to a nominal entertainment, like that given by the
Barmecide in the _Arabian Nights_, who put off his visitors with calling
for a number of exquisite things that never appeared, and with the
honour of his company. Mr. Cobbett is not a _make-believe_ writer: his
worst enemy cannot say that of him. Still less is he a vulgar one: he
must be a puny, common-place critic indeed who thinks him so. How
fine were the graphical descriptions he sent us from America: what a
Transatlantic flavour, what a native gusto, what a fine _sauce piquante_
of contempt they were seasoned with! If he had sat down to look
at himself in the glass, instead of looking about him like Adam in
Paradise, he would not have got up these articles in so capital a
style. What a noble account of his first breakfast after his arrival in
America! It might serve for a month. There is no scene on the stage more
amusing. How well he paints the gold and scarlet plumage of the American
birds, only to lament more pathetically the want of the wild wood-notes
of his native land! The groves of the Ohio that had just fallen beneath
the axe's stroke 'live in his description,' and the turnips that he
transplanted from Botley 'look green' in prose! How well at another time
he describes the poor sheep that had got the tick and had bled down in
the agonies of death! It is a portrait in the manner of Bewick, with
the strength, the simplicity, and feeling of that great naturalist. What
havoc be makes, when he pleases, of the curls of Dr. Parr's wig and
of the Whig consistency of Mr. (Coleridge?)! His _Grammar_, too, is as
entertaining as a story-book. He is too hard upon the style of others,
and not enough (sometimes) on his own.

As a political partisan no one can stand against him. With his
brandished club, like Giant Despair in the _Pilgrim's Progress_, he
knocks out their brains; and not only no individual but no corrupt
system could hold out against his powerful and repeated attacks, but
with the same weapon, swung round like a flail, that he levels his
antagonists, he lays his friends low, and puts his own party _hors de
combat_. This is a bad propensity., and a worse principle in political
tactics, though a common one. If his blows were straightforward and
steadily directed