Political Pamphlets

Political Pamphlets, by George
Saintsbury

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Title: Political Pamphlets
Author: George Saintsbury
Release Date: November 3, 2004 [EBook #13943]
Language: English
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THE POCKET LIBRARY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
Edited by GEORGE SAINTSBURY

A collection, in separate volumes, partly of extracts from long books,
partly of short pieces, by the same writer, on the same subject, or of the
same class.
Vol I.--Tales of Mystery. II.--Political Verse. III.--Defoe's Minor
Novels. IV.--Political Pamphlets. V.--Seventeenth Century Lyrics.
VI.--Elizabethan and Jacobean Pamphlets.

POLITICAL PAMPHLETS
EDITED BY GEORGE SAINTSBURY
LONDON PERCIVAL AND CO. 1892

CONTENTS
I. LETTER TO A DISSENTER. (By George Savile, Marquess of
Halifax)
II. THE SHORTEST WAY WITH THE DISSENTERS. (By Daniel
Defoe)
III. THE DRAPIER'S LETTERS. (By Jonathan Swift) To the
Tradesmen, Shop-Keepers, Farmers, and Common-People in general,
of the Kingdom of Ireland; concerning the Brass half-pence coined by
Mr. Wood
A Letter to Mr. Harding the Printer, upon occasion of a Paragraph in
his News-Paper of August 1, 1724, relating to Mr. Wood's Half-pence
IV. SECOND LETTER ON A REGICIDE PEACE. (By the Right
Honourable Edmund Burke)
V. PETER PLYMLEY'S LETTERS. (By Sydney Smith)
VI. LETTER TO THE JOURNEYMEN AND LABOURERS OF

ENGLAND, WALES, SCOTLAND, AND IRELAND. LETTER TO
JACK HARROW. (By William Cobbett)
VII. FIRST LETTER OF MALACHI MALAGROWTHER. (By Sir
Walter Scott)

INTRODUCTION
It is sometimes thought, and very often said, that political writing, after
its special day is done, becomes more dead than any other kind of
literature, or even journalism. I do not know whether my own judgment
is perverted by the fact of a special devotion to the business, but it
certainly seems to me that both the thought and the saying are mistakes.
Indeed, a rough-and-ready refutation of them is supplied by the fact
that, in no few cases, political pieces have entered into the generally
admitted stock of the best literary things. If they are little read, can we
honestly say that other things in the same rank are read much more?
And is there not the further plea, by no means contradictory, nor even
merely alternative, that the best examples of them are, as a rule, merged
in huge collected 'Works,' or, in the case of authors who have not
attained to that dignity, simply inaccessible to the general? At any rate
my publishers have consented to let me try the experiment of gathering
certain famous things of the sort in this volume, and the public must
decide.
I do not begin very early, partly because examples of the Elizabethan
political pamphlet, or what supplied its place, will be given in another
volume of the series exclusively devoted to the pamphlet literature of
the reigns of Eliza and our James, partly for a still better reason
presently to be explained. On the other hand, though another special
volume is devoted to Defoe, the immortal Shortest Way with the
Dissenters is separated from the rest of his work, and given here. Most
of the contents, however, represent authors not otherwise represented in
the series, and though very well known indeed by name, less read than
quoted. The suitableness of the political pamphlet, both by size and
self-containedness, for such a volume as this, needs no justification

except that which it, like everything else, must receive, by being put to
the proof of reading.
There is no difficulty in showing, with at least sufficient critical
exactness, why it is not possible or not desirable to select examples
from very early periods even of strictly modern history. The causes are
in part the same as those which delayed the production of really capital
political verse (which has been treated in another volume), but they are
not wholly the same. The Martin Marprelate pamphlets are strictly
political; so are many things earlier, later, and contemporary with them,
by hands known and unknown, great and small, skilled and unskilled;
so are some even in the work of so great a man as Bacon. But very
many things were wanting to secure the conditions necessary to the
perfect pamphlet. There was not the political freedom; there was not
the public; there was not the immediate object; there was not, last and
most of all, the style. Political utterances under a more or less despotic,
or, as the modern euphemism goes, 'personal' government, were almost
necessarily those