Part I has chronologically explored the rhetorical strategies deployed in Cobbett's writings until 1816, and has noted the changes in discursive practice demanded by his changing political aims during that period. In the Introduction I asserted that an understanding of this rhetorical self-consciousness puts a question mark over traditional critical tendencies to view Cobbett as a hot-headed combatant who writes with instinctive power, but whose instincts also lead him into regrettable intellectual nostalgia and bigotry. I have already explored the contemporary meanings and polemical usages of nostalgia at length. Part II will similarly find itself recurrently preoccupied with his populist rhetoric. I want to end Part I in this chapter by breaking away from chronology in order to suggest some ways in which Cobbett's egoistic persona – the third recurring problem identified in his prose – can be fruitfully related to the discourse of the ancient constitution and can be similarly seen as evidence of his sophisticated rhetorical strategy.

The passage of autobiography from Advice to Young Men with which this book began provides an example of Cobbett's problematic egoism, which is compounded as he adds