William Cobbett: "To the Editor of the Agricultural Magazine.
On the Subject of Potatoes." 1815.   Quotes.

It has become, of late years, the fashion to extol the virtues of potatoes, as it has been to admire the writings of Milton and Shakespear....it is the sacrificing of reason to fashion....it is to fashion that the potatoe owes its general cultivation and use.
If you ask me, whether fashion can possibly make a nation prefer one sort of diet to another, I ask you what it is that can make a nation admire Shakespear? What is it that can make them call him a "Divine Bard,"   nine-tenths of whose works are made up of such trash as no decent man, now-a-days, would not be ashamed, and even afraid, to put his name to? What can make an audience in London sit and hear, and even applaud, under the name of Shakespear, what they would hoot off the stage in a moment, if it came forth in any other name?....What can make them endure a ghost cap-à-pie, a prince who, for justice sake, pursues his uncle and his mother, and who stabs and old gentleman in sport, and cries out 'dead for a ducat! Dead' ? What can they find to 'delight' them in punning clowns, in ranting heroes, in sorcerers, ghosts, witches, fairies, monsters, soothsayers, dreamers; in incidents out of nature, in scenes most unnecessarily bloody?

...But, it is the same all through the work. I know of one other, and only one other, book so obscene as this; and if I were to judge from the high favour in which these two books seem to stand, I should conclude, that wild and improbable fiction, bad principles of morality and politics, obscurity in meaning, bombastical language, forced jokes, puns, and smut, were fitted to the minds of the people....