A few months earlier in this year, the ministerial part of the press had classed Burdett and Cobbett together as “a party endeavouring to create despondency.” This appears to have been the beginning of it; and Mr. Cobbett, on looking more dispassionately into Burdett’s claims as a politician, finds that the leading objects of both their minds are the same,-- “It will be recollected that, on the 2nd of July last, application was made to Parliament for a grant of 591,842_l._, wherewith to pay off the arrears of the Civil List; … Sir Francis Burdett took the liberty to say a few words to the _thirty or forty persons_ who were about to grant this half-million of money, which was to be raised upon the people.… He objected to the ground upon which the minister had made this application, and could not see, he said, why the rise in prices and the consequent abridgment of every man’s comforts should be urged as a reason for augmenting the amount of the Civil List. He complained that there was a waste of the public money.… He did not declaim against taxes, but against their too great amount, and against the misapplication of them.…” and protests that none but a contractor, a farmer-general, a paper-money maker, or a hired author, could find anything objectionable in the sentiments thus expressed. In short, Mr. Cobbett has discovered that the advocates of parliamentary reform are not, necessarily, a faction seeking to subvert the throne. He has had his grievance, some ten or a dozen years, against the “public-robbers;” but he has groped about, in pursuit of them, in crooked bye-ways: has even rubbed shoulders with them without knowing it: has now come in sight of the highway along which are running other pursuers, whose distant shouts have, till now, been unmeaning, because misunderstood. He looks with abhorrence at the prospect of a revival “of those political animosities which were, during the last war and at the last peace, so fruitful in national calamity and disgrace, which destroyed all freedom of discussion and almost of intercourse; and which, while it sheltered all the follies and faults of the minister even from inquiry, exposed every word and act of every other man to misrepresentation and suspicion.” Here, then, we have Mr. Cobbett fairly started upon his mission. Parliamentary opposition, hitherto, had meant a struggle for power and place, with the biggest share in the nation’s loaves and fishes; it would henceforth signify a determination to watch the grasping hand, to restrain the thirsty leech. And Mr. Cobbett will, at any cost, keep the nation on the alert concerning the proper disposition of its resources.