Three years before the young queen was crowned, William Cobbett was
buried at Farnham. It may seem strange to begin with this great
neglected name, rather than the old age of Wordsworth or the young death
of Shelley. But to any one who feels literature as human, the empty
chair of Cobbett is more solemn and significant than the throne. With
him died the sort of democracy that was a return to Nature, and which
only poets and mobs can understand. After him Radicalism is urban--and
Toryism suburban. Going through green Warwickshire, Cobbett might have
thought of the crops and Shelley of the clouds. But Shelley would have
called Birmingham what Cobbett called it--a hell-hole. Cobbett was one
with after Liberals in the ideal of Man under an equal law, a citizen of
no mean city. He differed from after Liberals in strongly affirming that
Liverpool and Leeds are mean cities.
It is no idle Hibernianism to say that towards the end of the eighteenth
century the most important event in English history happened in France.
It would seem still more perverse, yet it would be still more precise,
to say that the most important event in English history was the event
that never happened at all--the English Revolution on the lines of the
French Revolution.
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