Daily National Intelligencer

The Examiner, in animadverting on, & confuting Mr. Cobbett's reason for abandoning his country, says—

"This is not the way in which Milton, who undertook to defend the rights of the people of England, was accustomed to choose between alternatives, whether those alternatives were the loss of property, of liberty, of his eye-sight or even his life. Upon the breaking out of the troubles with Scotland, when he was in Italy, and when Charles I. was fully bent upon his infatuated measures, his first feeling was that of being at home to partake the danger—'I was desirous,' says he, 'of visiting Sicily and Greece, but the sad news of the civil war in England recalled me; for I thought it base to be rambling abroad, even for my mind's sake, while my countrymen were battling for their liberties at home.' And at home he remained to the last, tho' he had talent that he might have turned to account in any part of the world, and though he ultimately had to wear out his days in a solitary and lofty sorrow, impoverished and blind—

'With darkness and with dangers compassed around,'

his labors, however, were not lost: the despotic dynasty that crushed him, was crushed in its turn; partly out of his republican theories was completed that noble edifice of the English constitution, for the restoration of which his descendants are now calling with a voice worthy of their ancestor.

"It is no ill compliment to Mr. Cobbett to think of him at the same time with Milton, even to his disadvantage; but we mention the two together, not so much out of reproof to the former, as to shew why it was, that when he came to these pushes he could not act like the latter. It is from want of sentiment and imagination—those qualities which relieve the mind from the dreariness of painful matters of fact, and clothed them with reflected colors, and put pillows about them for the spirit to repose on. The same deficiency that makes Mr. Cobbett see nothing grand in Shakespeare, makes him see nothing great in the risking of sufferance.

When Milton was abroad and heard the troubles of his country, he was anxious to return and share the grandeur of the danger; when Mr. Cobbett thinks he sees danger coming, he feels nothing but the thing itself, and is only anxious to argue himself to a distance from it. When Milton, in his old age, blind and solitary, felt himself surrounded by dangers, he retreated into the glories of epic poetry, and thought only casually of his triumphant enemies; when Mr. C. was in prison, he could only regret his freedom, and make himself doubly uncomfortable with an eternal feeling of resentment. Milton's parting with his eye-sight is a memorable instance of the resources of his great mind. The physicians told him, that if he went on with his Defence of the People of England, he would infallibly lose his eye-sight; to which he answered, that he had no "choice between his eye-sight and his duty."