6

entry in her journal for one day is plenty to do, and plenty to love, and plenty to pity. No one need die of ennui ;' and this earnest feeling marks all we read of herself in these pages. Her character visibly deepens. Her heart opens, and her intellect is less fascinated by such brilliancy as that which attracted her so strongly during her association with Sterling, Mill, and Carlyle. She visibly breaks away from Mill and Carlyle towards the close of the volume. I am reading,' she says in 1859, that terrible book of John Mill's on Liberty, so clear and calm and cold. He lays it on one as a tremendous duty to get oneself well contradicted, and admit always a devil's advocate into the presence of your dearest, most sacred truths. . . . He looks you through like a basilisk, relentless as fate. We knew him well at one time and owe him very much. He is in many senses isolated, and must sometimes shiver with the cold.' There is a fine passage in a memorandum where she records a struggle she passed through at the age of twenty-one, which is a healthy and invigorating contrast to this cold scepticism of Mill's later years. Why' (I said to myself) should I thus help to swell the triumph of the infernal powers by tampering with their miserable suggestions of unbelief, and neglecting the amazing gift which Christ has so long been offering me? I know that He is the Redeemer of all such as believe in Him; and I will believe, and look for His support in the contest with unbelief.' How deep and humble this faith became is affectingly depicted in the following memorandum, which was found after her death:

'My precious father and mother must keep whatever of mine they may like to have. It is vain to attempt to thank them for all they have done for me. I have often, very often, been most provoking and irresponsive to their loving-kindness, but in the bottom of my heart not, I trust, ungrateful. Farewell, darlings all. If you can forgive and love me, remember with comfort that our God and Saviour is even more loving, more forgiving than you are, and think of me with peace and trustfulness and thanksgiving, as one whom He has graciously taught, mainly through sorrows, to trust and to love Him utterly, and to grieve only over the ingratitude of my sins, the sense of which is but deepened by His free forgiveness."

It is little to say that none will read these journals without being instructed or entertained. None ought to be able to read them without being the better for intercourse with so gentle and gracious a spirit, or without being encouraged by her faith and patience.

ART. VII.—1. The Life of Richard Cobden. By John Morley, M.A. 2 vols. London, 1882.

2. The Life and Speeches of John Bright, M.P. By George Barnett Smith. 2 vols. London, 1881.

IT

may be taken for granted that all the information which the public can desire to possess concerning Mr. Bright and Mr. Cobden is to be found in these volumes. The life of Mr. Cobden occupies nearly a thousand closely-printed pages; that of Mr. Bright upwards of eleven hundred. Much may be said in two thousand one hundred pages, and if the biographers have done their duty well, we may safely conclude that they have told us all that there is to tell down to the present moment, and have left little or nothing to be gleaned by future labourers in the same field. With regard to Mr. Morley's share of the task, there has been a remarkable unanimity of opinion in the press on one particular point—namely, that 'The Life of Cobden' is destined to occupy a place of honour among the classical works of our literature. Contemporary predictions of this kind so often turn out to be wrong-we have seen so many works that were pronounced immortal sink into oblivion-that it was only natural to receive the enthusiastic judgment of the critics with some suspicion. But it very soon became clear that it was not permissible to entertain a doubt upon the subject. The frame of mind appropriate to the consideration of this work is, we are assured, one of mingled admiration and awe. It is not an ordinary biography, but a manual of public spirit;' 'every young man who aspires to be a worthy patriotic citizen should read it.' Moreover, we are given to understand that no one can be called happy until he is dead and his life has been written by Mr. Morley. Cobden, we are assured, not only was happy, judged by any rational standard of happiness, up to the end of his life, but he has been happy after his death. To obtain such a biographer as Mr. Morley must be admitted to be a stroke of good fortune of no common kind.' There is no one who would not be impatient to 'shuffle off this mortal coil' if he could but make sure beforehand that he would be afterwards led into the Temple of Fame by Mr. Morley. Such was the general tone of the criticisms on The Life of Cobden,' and it proved once more that, whatever faults may be laid at the door of the Radicals, they cannot justly be accused of not standing faithfully by one another.

We must confess that, with every desire not to disturb the

The Manchester School: Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright. 553

remarkable unanimity to which we have referred, we have been unable to adopt the conclusions upon which it rests. Leaving out of sight the higher merits claimed for the book as a manual for Citizens and a guide for Youth, it appears to us that the author has by no means exercised remarkable skill or judgment, that he has shown far too great an eagerness to obtrude upon the reader his own views of men and things, and that his work is at least twice as long as it need have been. Almost every chapter is overloaded with much useless and extraneous matter, and a large part of the work-a far larger part than was at all justifiable is made up of quotations which could well have been spared. Cobden's Speeches' are accessible to the public in a cheap form, and Mr. Morley was not by any means obliged to borrow from them, or to fill up his pages with extracts from newspapers. Many of the selections given from Cobden's journals add nothing whatever to our knowledge of his character, and possess no intrinsic interest. We give one example only of such passages:

6

'Trieste, June 26th.-Left Venice this morning at six o'clock in the Austrian Lloyd's steamboat, a handsome, large, and clean vessel. It was low water, and as we came out of the port, through the tortuous channel which winds amongst the islands, it afforded a good view of the advantages which the Queen of the Adriatic possessed behind these intricate barriers. The view of the city at a few miles' distance, with its palaces, towers, and domes, rising from the level of the water, and its low country at the back shut in by high mountains, is very magnificent. Reached Trieste at two o'clock. The coast hilly, and the town stands upon a confined spot shut in by the high land, which rises immediately at the back. The ships lie in an open roadstead, and are exposed to certain winds. The number of squarerigged vessels, and the activity in the port, offer a contrast to the scene at Venice.'

If quotations equally barren and pointless had been omitted, the memory of Cobden would not have suffered, and Mr. Morley would have deserved to be called the greatest of living biographers' just as well as he does now.

Moreover, it must be pointed out that Mr. Morley is by no means guiltless of the habit of using high-sounding phrases and fine words which are intended solely for show, and can be of no sort of benefit to any man, but may possibly prove a hindrance to readers who honestly go to him for instruction. He appears to take a genuine pleasure in what he himself describes as 'verbal jingle,' and above all things he feels it his duty to be grand and stately. He says of Cobden's father, that 'poverty oozed in with a gentle swiftness, and lay about him like a

cloak.'

cloak.' (Vol. i. p. 3.) We fail to understand how anything that can 'ooze in' is capable of being made up into any sort of cloak, whether lively or dull, although Sancho Panza has told us that sleep may wrap us round like a cloak. Mr. Morley must be fine and picturesque' at all costs. 'It is only when people want to get something done,' he says, 'that all the odd perversities of the human mind spread themselves out in panoramic fulness.' (i. 155.) It is not necessary, we hope, to point out to the Young Man before referred to, what richness of colour is imparted to this sentence by the use of the word panoramic.' Again, we are told that many a League meeting rang with fierce laughter,' and that Mr. Gladstone has (or had) a 'fine vision.' At the age of twenty-one, Cobden became a commercial traveller-a fact sufficiently simple in its character to be related in simple language. The subject is limited in its scope, and does not well adapt itself to the heroic or romantic method of treatment. But Mr. Morley dilates upon it with great animation. It was a 'rise in the hierarchy of trade' which is doubtless as good matter for exultation as a rise in hierarchies more elaborately robed.' (i. 7.) When Dr. Johnson was importuned by a versifier to tell him whether his lines were not poetry, the old critic, desirous to avoid giving pain, said: Sir, there is here a great deal of what is generally called poetry.' In the same way it may be truly said there is in Mr. Morley a great deal of what is generally called eloquence. Here is a sentence, for example, which certainly shows a great command of language. Its meaning is, that the Anti-corn-law agitation was making progress: The promptings of a commercial shrewdness were gradually enlarged into enthusiasm for a farreaching principle, and the hard-headed man of business felt himself touched with the generous glow of the patriot and the deliverer.' (i. 142.) In like manner, Mr. Morley refers to the work of calculating how many tracts were distributed and speeches delivered during the Corn-law agitation as 'the nice measurement of argumentative importunity in terms of weight and bulk.' There will always be a certain number of readers who are struck dumb with amazement at a style of this kind, and no doubt it has its merits, such as they are; but it is going a little too far to recommend it to the universal imitation of mankind. Even in the hands of a master, like Mr. Morley, it is apt to go wrong and produce a ludicrous effect upon the mind. A picture, for example, is drawn of Mr. Cobden, which is far more suggestive of the sporting prints which once ornamented the rooms of undergraduates, than of the portrait of a statesman. 'He had a way,' we are told, of dropping his jaw

and

and throwing back his head when he took off the gloves for an encounter in real earnest.' Of Mr. Gladstone we are told that on one occasion 'the struggle in the forum of his own conscience was long and severe,' and that he 'revolted from the frank irrationality of the common panic-mongers of the street and the newspaper.' (i. 307.) It is in this way that Mr. Morley has done his work throughout, and, that being so, we must maintain that he has been as lucky in his critics as Mr. Cobden has been in his biographer. It is evident that a writer of approved Radical principles may make tolerably sure that his candle will always be set on an exceedingly high hill. M. Caro, of the Académie Française, has recently complained that the art of criticism has degenerated into mere puffisme littéraire,' and that an author who belongs to a favoured clique is surrounded with a false aureole of glory. On cite ses mots, on les vante, on les impose à la circulation comme la menue monnaie du génie. Dès qu'il daigne écrire, on ne le critique pas, on l'encense.'* It is not quite clear on which side the Channel M. Caro had his eyes fixed when he wrote these lines, but we should not be surprised to learn that Mr. Morley felt himself entitled to ask for some explanation.

Mr. G. Barnett Smith has not had so much incense burnt before his altar as Mr. Morley, but there is a limit to the goodnature of the most friendly critics. The Life of Bright' is one of the most tedious and most muddled books we remember to have read, consisting in a great measure of dull abstracts of Mr. Bright's speeches, varied only by long quotations from those speeches, badly arranged and joined together by feeble comments, and forming a great, clumsy, unwieldy book, which no man possessing merely the ordinary share of human patience will be able to read through. Mr. Morley's' system faults, but it is superior in every way to that of Mr. G. Barnett Smith.

These volumes, notwithstanding their defects, and the collected speeches of Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright, will enable any industrious student to comprehend, and perhaps to appreciate, the opinions which were held by the Corn-law agitators, and upon which the present Birmingham school of politics is based. It cannot be denied that these opinions are worthy of attentive consideration, for they have had a great deal to do with the success of the modern Radical party, and they are a living force in the public issues of the present hour. It is needless to say that Mr. Bright and Mr. Cobden did not restrict their field of

* Revue des deux Mondes.' February, 1, 1882, p. 556.

operations