ABSTRACT
People have about as substantial an idea of William Cobbett as they have of Cribb. His blows are as hard, and he himself is as impenetrable. One has no notion of him as making use of a fine pen but a great mutton-fist. Paine is a much more sententious writer than Cobbett. One 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 an epithet of abuse or a nickname. Mr Cobbett is great in attack, not in defence. The late Lord Thurlow used to say that Cobbett was the only writer that deserved the name of a political reasoner.
