must have been who could have left such memorials of their power. But it was not until he read the history of his country that the deep impression left on his mind by his early and familiar acquaintance with Waverley Abbey took form, and how it did this passage from his "Protestant Reformation" will show:—
"The monastics built and wrote for posterity. They executed everything in the very best manner; their gardens, fish ponds, farms, in all, in the whole of their economy, they set an example, tending to make the country beautiful, to make it an object of pride with the people, and to make the nation truly and permanently great. Go into any country, and survey, even at this day, the ruins of its perhaps twenty abbeys and priories; and then ask yourself, 'What have we in exchange for these?' Go to the site of some once opulent convent. Look at the cloister, now become, in the hands of a rack-renter, the receptacle for dung, fodder, and faggot-wood; see the hall, where for ages the widow, the orphan, the aged, and the stranger found a table ready spread; see a bit of its walls now helping to make a cattle-shed, the rest having been hauled away to build a workhouse; recognise in the side of a barn a part of the once magnificent chapel"; and so on, until he brings you to "listen to an account of the hypocritical pretences, the base motives, the tyrannical and bloody means under which, from which, and by which, that devastation was affected, and that hospitality banished for ever from the land."
It was the indelible impression which this early acquaintance with Waverley Abbey made on his mind which led him into such a fierce and life-long opposition to all modern social arrangements. In a dashing, witty critique which William Hazlitt wrote on Cobbet's character he says, "He is not wedded to his notions—not he. He had not one Mrs Cobbett among all his opinions." This may seem true to any one who dives . here and there at haphazard into his numerous works, but there is one notion, one opinion, he set out with, which he never changed—a conviction which had its birth in the gardens of Waverley Abbey, which gained strength with every book he read, every experience he passed through, and every scene he saw. And it was this:—that in one way or another the arrangements of modern society all tend to crush the poor man, poor being here a relative term, and not to be understood
