SOURCE: "The Revival of Cobbett" and "Last Days and Death," in William Cobbett, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1926, pp. 3-25, 219-54.

Regarded as one of England's premier men of letters during the first half of the twentieth century, Chesterton is best known today as a colorful bon vivant, a witty essayist, and as the creator of the Father Brown mysteries. Chesterton shared Cobbett's belief that the Reformation brought on many of modern Europe's social problems. In the excerpt below, Chesterton discursively examines the paradoxes ofCobbett's beliefs and the significance of his work as a reformer, comparing Cobbett's thought with that of Edmund Burke and Thomas Carlyle.

It is but a year or two ago that I had the great and (it is to be feared) the undeserved honour of reading a paper on

Satirical depiction of Cobbett writing to Henry Hunt from his Long Island farm.