Note 4 — Chapter XIX · “THE FOLLY, COMMON TO ALL TYRANTS, IS THAT THEY PUSH THINGS TOO FAR.”

This omitting to write for two or three weeks, together with the rumoured dropping of the Register, created tremendous sensation among the scribbling fraternity. The Morning Chronicle returned to Cobbett all the warm feelings which Perry had received from him. The Examiner, on the other hand, was mercilessly unjust. That vigorous paper was then in its early priggish days, and could brook no rivalry. Leigh Hunt looked with contempt upon all the set of Cobbetts and Cochranes, as not Reformists after his sort, and he now proceeded to attack Cobbett violently for his timidity, and for his whining about being torn from his home, &c.; adding that politicians must be prepared to endanger individual freedom for the sake of the general good. But then the “spirit of martyrdom had been inculcated” in the Hunts from the very cradle.

The readers of the Examiner, however, were not at one with their editor upon this point. One correspondent thought it ill-befitting a Reformist to overlook all the merits of a fellow-labourer, just at the moment of his being down, and “to dwell with a malignant ecstasy on all the failings that industrious malice could scrape together from years of bold and zealous service.” It was also pointed out, with much justice, that Mr. Cobbett was singular in this: that he not only confessed his errors when he had found them out, but argued clearly and decisively against them. Of course, the Examiner was so clever that it had no errors to retract.

Leigh Hunt appears to have discovered, in after-years, that he often made extravagant demands upon other people’s virtue; and the allusion, in his autobiography, to some want of charity toward other people’s opinions, points to this period, when intolerance could animate the Radical quite as easily as the privileged mind.

Mr. Redhead Yorke had long been converted from Radicalism, and had no sympathy for the delinquent. But he was, now, on the other side.