Note 4 — Chapter XVIII · “COMPARED WITH DEFEATING ME, DEFEATING BUONAPARTE IS A MERE TRIFLE.”

The “profession and character” of the fraternity had just been roughly assailed in Parliament by Mr. Windham. The question of excluding reporters from the gallery of the House of Commons was one which would come up at intervals, and it was one upon which most public men changed their opinions, from time to time, according to circumstances. Mr. Windham was now for shutting the gallery; and he described the publishers of the Debates as bankrupts, lottery-office keepers, footmen, and decayed tradesmen, and he had heard “that they were a sort of men who would give into corrupt misrepresentations of opposite sides.” As Mr. Wright was the only person among the parliamentary reporters who could be put under the head of “bankrupts,” the Political Register gave Mr. Windham a castigation.

The venal writers of the day, of course, called this black treachery and ingratitude. But then such writers had no interest in upholding the craft—rather the other way. Of this class was the Satirist, or Monthly Meteor, one of the foulest pieces of rubbish that ever disgraced the periodical press. This paper recommended that Cobbett’s article (which was in extremely temperate terms) should be framed and glazed by every public man, as a warning never to trust this wretch, &c.

The Satirist was one long-drawn libel. The editor must have been utterly insusceptible of shame, or else must have been in the habit of deadening his moral feelings by artificial means. Even the good and patriotic Whitbread was represented as one who delighted in practising, upon his own estate, that tyranny against which he declaimed in the House of Commons. As for Finnerty, he is always “the miscreant,” and Mr. Wardle, “the l——r.” Wright is described as “the poor devil who now corrects Cobbett’s bad English, edits his Parliamentary History, brushes his coat, puffs him in coffee-houses and debating-shops, and does all his other dirty work,” &c.

It is very difficult to please everybody. The Examiner presently began to write down Mr. Windham, supporting itself with this affair of the reporters, and howled at Mr. Cobbett for not doing the same. The fact being that Cobbett was especially careful to avoid needless animadversions upon his old friend.