ings, and pence! The fact is, he _ratted_ from his own
project. He found the thing not so ripe as he had expected. His heart
failed him; his enthusiasm fled, and he made his retractation. His
admiration is short-lived; his contempt only is rooted, and his
resentment lasting.--The above was only one instance of his building too
much on practical _data_. He has an ill habit of prophesying, and goes
on, though still decieved. The art of prophesying does not suit Mr.
Cobbett's style. He has a knack of fixing names and times and places.
According to him, the Reformed Parliament was to meet in March 1818--it
did not, and we heard no more of the matter. When his predictions
fail, he takes no further notice of them, but applies himself to new
ones--like the country people who turn to see what weather there is in
the almanac for the next week, though it has been out in its reckoning
every day of the last.

Mr. Cobbett is great in attack, not in defence; he cannot fight an
up-hill battle. He will not bear the least punishing. If any one turns
upon him (which few people like to do) he immediately turns tail. Like
an overgrown schoolboy, he is so used to have it all his own way, that
he cannot submit to anything like competition or a struggle for the
mastery; he must lay on all the blows, and take none. He is bullying
and cowardly; a Big Ben in politics, who will fall upon others and crush
them by his weight, but is not prepared for resistance, and is soon
staggered by a few smart blows. Whenever he has been set upon, he has
slunk out of the controversy. The _Edinburgh Review_ made (what is
called) a dead set at him some years ago, to which he only retorted by
an eulogy on the superior neatness of an English kitchen-garden to a
Scotch one. I remember going one day into a bookseller's shop in Fleet
Street to ask for the _Review_, and on my expressing my opinion to a
young Scotchman, who stood behind the counter, that Mr. Cobbett might
hit as hard in his reply, the North Briton said with some alarm, 'But
you don't think, sir, Mr. Cobbett will be able to injure the Scottish
nation?' I said I could not speak to that point, but I thought he was
very well able to defend himself. He, however, did not, but has borne a
grudge to the _Edinburgh Review_ ever since, which he hates worse than
the _Quarterly_. I cannot say I do.(2)

NOTES to ESSAY VI

(1) The late Lord Thurlow used to say that Cobbett was the only writer
that deserved t