Central Railway, which unfortunately were not fully paid up. The enthusiastic anticipations of prosperity which coloured Cobden's business, not less than his political, views, led him to expect almost immediate returns from a railway possessing such immense natural advantages. 666 "I recollect,' says Mr. W. S. Lindsay, 'having many conversations with Cobden on this subject. I agreed with him entirely as to the prospects of the line, but we differed as to the time when the large prospective profits of the undertaking could be realised. He thought they were close at hand; I, on the contrary, held the opinion that, while all the land would in time find purchasers, they would belong rather to the next generation than to our own. In this instance my views came true.' The upshot was, that in 1858 a call was made upon the shares, which Cobden was in no condition to meet. "Mr. Thomasson of Bolton hearing from Mr. Slagg, their common friend, that Cobden was embarrassed by one of these outstanding loans for the Illinois shares, amounting to several thousand pounds, released the shares, and sent them to Cobden, with a request that he would do him the favour to accept their freedom at his hands, in acknowledgment of his vast services to his country and mankind. On a later occasion, when the same difficulty recurred for the same reasons, Mr. Thomasson went down to Midhurst, ascertained the circumstances, and insisted that Cobden should accept a still larger sum, refusing a formal acknowledgment, and handing it over in such a form that the transaction was not known to any one but Cobden and himself." Two years after Cobden was again in such straits that he had to apply to "one of his oldest and most confidential friends in Manchester for aid and advice." The result on this occasion was "a sub scription privately raised, which amounted to the sum of £40,000." It is with a feeling of pity for Cobden that we have followed Mr. Morley through these details; but it is our duty to ask whether the public views of a man who could make such "miscalculations" in his own private affairs, deserve to carry the weight that his disciples attach to them? The same oversanguine spirit that misled Cobden in his own business transactions coloured all his views of financial policy. He failed in his personal expectations; who can say that his public prognostications have come more true? He believed that Free Trade was to prove a panacea for all the distresses of the nation; have periods of commercial and agricultural depression been less frequent or less severely felt since we gave effect to his views? He prophesied that Britain had only to set the example to make all the great commercial states of the world converts to Free Trade; has a single nation followed his lead? and is not Protection to-day gaining fresh converts among the ablest statesmen and economical thinkers in both Germany and America? And yet the authority of Cobden is largely appealed to as a ground why we should accept Free Trade as a dogma, to be received implicitly and without question. The intolerance with which the League pressed its principles upon the country is still exerted in their maintenance; and even a demand for a fair consideration of the Free Trade system is decried as sacrilege. Every question is admitted to have two sides to it, but Free Trade must form the exception. Yet we see from Cobden's life that the system was formed upon very imperfect premisses, and that it was pressed upon the country in the light of expectations which have never been realised. Cobden's friends might bear the burden of his private miscalculations; for his public errors the country has had, and will have, to pay. We have said that we do not think Cobden's reputation will stand higher in the minds of those who read Mr. Morley's volumes; and yet, if we can only turn away from the picture of the political agitator, and concentrate our attention upon the man himself, we meet with many qualities that are both likeable and estimable. His unvarying kindness to his relations, the strength of his friendships, his real sympathy with the cause of the distressed and the oppressed, sprang from a better side of his nature than that which he presented to the public from the platform. We believe him to have been in the main sincere in his convictions, although the methods which he resorted to when impressing them on the public were very often those of the charlatan. He was unfortunate enough to think that political wisdom was the monopoly of himself and his own party. He hated but respected the Tories, as may be clearly seen from his correspondence. His contempt for the Whigs is only equalled by the withering scorn with which his biographer pursues that suffering remnant; and he had but little respect for the collective wisdom of the masses, simply looking upon them as the raw material of agitation. It would be well for the "teeming thousands" who cheer our Radical statesmen to the echo if they could see the opinions that their leaders express of them in private correspondence, such as we find in Cobden's letters. It says, however, much for Cobden's character that, VOL. CXXX.-NO. DCCXCIV. pertinacious and dogmatic as he often was forced to be in carrying on his struggle, he conducted his campaign, with a few exceptions, in a spirit of geniality and good-humour. He never gave way to the spirit of brutality which has unfortunately marred too many of Mr. Bright's most powerful speeches. On the other hand, Cobden wants the semblance of dignity with which a sterner and more uncompromising attitude has invested the career of the latter. Cobden's instincts of honour were not of a high order. He was not above making the fact of his being a member of the Church of England subservient to his popularity as a Free Trade agitator. In these days, when books like shooting stars pass across the firmament only to shine and disappear, it is information to be told, upon the authority of the author, that the 'Life of Cobden' is to be read and annotated by the next generation (vol. i. p. 101). For our own humble part we would have hesitated to hazard such a prediction. We are not surprised, however, to find that the press has done its best to encourage Mr. Morley in this delusion, and to puff him up in the conceit that he is very little short of being a Boswell or a Lockhart. The fraternity that prevails among the claqueurs of journalism would be touching if it were either sincere or disinterested. We cannot ourselves assign Mr. Morley a place in the first rank of biographers. We have already alluded to the serious error which he commits of obtruding his own opinions too frequently, and of interposing himself too much between Cobden and the reader. No great writer would commit such a blunder; but it is an old trick of Mr. Morley to make the subject of his studies merely a stalking-horse 3 F for airing himself. His own imposing personality is kept as assiduously before us throughout his chapters as on his title pages. Nor are the literary merits of the book sufficient to secure it a place among the standard biographies of English statesmen. The reader is conscious that Mr. Morley's style is weakened by his excess of mannerisms, and, we are bound to say, by not a little slip shod English. Our space will only allow us to quote two instances, but we had marked a good many more on our way through the volumes. "Nothing could surpass the childlike simplicity with which every absurd and improbable rumour was believed, unless it were the stolid scepticism with which all offers to demonstrate their falsehood was rejected" (ii. 131). "No great body was conciliated, nor attracted, nor even touched with friendly interest," &c. (i. 171), we shall not follow Mr. Morley's irreconcilable misunderstanding with the double negative farther. And as for metaphors, here is one culled at random, from the third page of the first volume,- "Poverty oozed in with gentle swiftness, and lay about him like a dull cloak for the rest of his life." But it is neither pleasant nor profitable to dwell upon Mr. Morley's hostility to the precise observances of the English language. We have quoted at length the stilted passage in which he describes the two Free Trade apostles as setting out on their pilgrimage; and it would be easy, if our space permitted, to cite numerous other flights equally high above the regions of sober and sensible prose. But the greatest defect of these volumes is the dogmatic and intolerant tone which Mr. Morley considers himself-heaven knows why!-permitted to use all through them. Had Mr. Morley's Life of Cobden' appeared in the League era, when criticism was much more outspoken than in the present day, the book would have at once been pronounced to be the Biography of a Bagman written by a Cockney. One of the latest additions to the Scotch calendar was characterised by his successor as having been ane sair sanct for the Crown." If Cobden is to be canonised, we fear the cry will come from many quarters that he has been "ane sair sanct for the country." His doctrines were hastily accepted, but we have had leisure to weigh them if not to repent of them; and the longer they are considered, and their practical application felt, the less reason the country has to congratulate itself upon them. It is little satisfaction in the present state of depression to understand that Mr. Cobden was a man of great economical and political genius, falling short, if of any one, only of his biographer; but we feel certain that no person of unbiassed mind will lay down these volumes without a conviction that Cobden had few of the qualities which make a man a great statesman, and none of the caution that marks one out as a safe leader of the populace. INDEX TO VOL. CXXX. 'Abode of Snow,' the author of the.141. Advocate, the calling of a Venetian, Eschylus, the "Choëphori" of, con- Alchymist, the," by David Scott, 604. ALIVE, AND YET DEAD: SOME PAS- Ameni, King of Egypt, his tomb, 352. Andorra, the Republic of, 632. Nichol, Scott's illustrations to, 607. AUTUMNAL RAMBLE, HINTS FOR AN, Bank-notes, State claim to issue, 509. Banks, the Scotch, their application to 507. Basque Song of Roland, the, 630. Ben Lomond, rambles on, 170. a sergeant's exploit, 280-the armis- BOERS AT HOME, THE: JOTTINGS FROM Boers, siege of Standerton by the, 1, Booth, Mr. Edwin, his Shakespearian Bricks, Egyptian, 215. Britain, Great, her relations with Tunis, "Brochs" in Orkney, 399. Bronker's Spruit, massacre of, 769. 'Buried Alive; or, Ten Years of Penal BURTON, THE LATE JOHN HILL, 401. Carnarvon, Lord, his translation of the 66 Cervantes, Mr. Duffield's blunders re- Claretie, M. Jules, his 'Monsieur le Colley, Sir George, 1. Coptic marriages, 379-funerals, 343. Curchod, Susan, Mme. Necker, 240 et Cyprus, capture of, by the Turks, 473. Berryer, Mme. Jaubert's recollections Daudet, M., his 'Numa Roumestan,' of, 71. BESIEGED IN THE TRANSVAAL: THE DEFENCE OF STANDERTON, Part I., 704-Le Petit Chose,' 715. Empire, 436-their effacement under DECOYS AND DECOYING, 745-history Derbyshire, rambles in, 166. "Descent from the Cross," by David DON QUIXOTE, A NEW, 469. Drury Lane, the Meiningen Company Duffield, Mr. A. J., his translation of 'Don Quixote' reviewed, 469. ELECTRA, 306-the Electra of Sopho- cles, 307-compared with the Electra 'Essai sur l'étude de la Littérature,' ETHICS OF GLADSTONIANISM, THE, 634 -Mr. Gladstone's supersession of his Euripides, the Electra of, 306 et seq. Faubourg St. Germain, its society, 434. 'Five Years' Penal Servitude,' 25. Free Trade, predictions regarding, re- French influence in Tunis, 130 et seq. Gladstone, his sensational legislation, GLADSTONIANISM, THE ETHICS OF, 634. GOLDONI, CARLO: AUTOBIOGRAPHIES, Hamirs, French expedition against, 135. Haybee, 212 et seq. Heine, Mme. Jaubert's recollections of, Heredity in crime, 26 et seq. Herodotus, his account of the Laby- Himalayas, the, compared with the HINTS FOR AN AUTUMNAL RAMBLE, BY Howara, Pyramid of, 39. 572- |