The grave was literally his last enemy. The announcement of Cobbett’s death was the close of a strife, in which had been displayed the singular spectacle of the Champion of the Press arrayed against its own licentiousness; in which the dangers attendant upon the conjuring up of new foes had been counted as nothing, while there was a principle to be maintained, or a touch of cant to be exposed. And, now that he was gone for ever, the whole fraternity acknowledged his genius and his talents; and confessed that a good, and great, and honest heart had departed from among them. Throughout the land, with almost unanimity, the newspapers teemed with his praises; and those were not few, who, having not long since boasted of their hatred, now frankly declared that Mr. Cobbett was a man of whom his countrymen might justly be proud, as one of the greatest that England had ever produced. The last years of Mr. Cobbett’s domestic life were of singular tranquillity. Surrounded as he was by a family, the individual members of which had “never caused him a day’s anxiety,” his hearth was a complete antithesis to the stormy scenes outside. And he had that felicity, the first wish of every good man’s heart, of seeing his sons and daughters bear the fruits of his own example, in a correct estimate of the duties and the discipline of life. Not only that. Age never came upon him in crabbed form. There was a soft, genial nature about Mr. Cobbett, which no surface vehemence could exorcise. Even, when dealing his heaviest blows upon the heads of the poor “borough-mongers,” or when pouring his most terrible sarcasms around, his energy was the energy of warmth; as though heated with his own heart’s blood. It would be difficult to find any one essay among his writings, which, fairly analyzed, did not betray honest, impetuous affection for the cause immediately on hand. You cannot fail, as you read, to recognize the unpaid advocate. That he was ridiculously vain of his success in life, is no more than could be expected of a half-educated man, who had held, for more than a generation, such extraordinary power with the lower and middle classes; but such vanity, fostered sometimes by individuals and sometimes by the crowd, was not of that sort typified by the Napoleons and the Masaniellos of life. No: the sword laid down, and the helm removed from the brow, left this warrior a homely citizen, resting with the children, and the birds, the fruits and flowers, and the sweetest hospitalities. So, old age brought nothing to Mr. Cobbett, of the burthen. “Always at work or sleep,” the work he did at seventy years of age was not excelled in quality by that of any previous period of his life; and, had it not been for the enforced change of habits brought about by his attendance in parliament, he might have lived another decade or so. He had, even, inured himself to noisy Fleet Street. Speaking, somewhere, of his upper room in Bolt Court, he says,--