vituperative style, which for years was imitated by the American press.
Considering the briefness of his sojourn in this country and the short time that he was identified with American politics and journalism, Cobbett made, as Henry Cabot Lodge has pointed out, a great and lasting impression.[1] Not only was he one of the founders of our party press, but he was, as Senator Lodge says, "the ablest" of them—certainly the most vituperative. He had a vigorous and impulsive, but a half-educated, mind. This was to be to a large extent characteristic of many of the forceful figures who, in the development of journalism in the new country during the next fifty years, were destined to be the pioneers in America not only of journalism but of the country itself.
The Genet incident brought to the front another vigorous anti-Federalist editor, Benjamin Franklin Bache, the grandson of Benjamin Franklin. As a boy Bache had traveled with his grandfather to Paris, and had been educated in France and at Geneva. He gained some knowledge of printing in the house of Didot in Paris, came back with his grandfather to America in 1785, finished his college studies in Philadelphia, and, on the first of October, 1790, appeared as a full-fledged publisher and editor on the General Advertiser. It was not so much under this title as under the title of Aurora—which was assumed in November, 1794—that the paper became a bitter and vigorous opponent of Hamilton and the Federalists.
With the breaking' out of the French Revolution, Bache's pro-French sympathies were given full play, and the French ambassador, Genet, had no more vigorous defender than Bache. Whatever of restraint there had
- ↑ Studies in History, 110.
