668 LIFE OF COBDEN., - {or xxVT

1857.
Ar. b8.

hold a trust which I am rendered physically and mentally
incapable of fulfilling.”
“I came away on Tuesday,” he continues, * after listening
 for two hours and a half to Disraeli. I wish there could
be some Bessemer’s power invented for shortening the tine
of speaking in the House. My belief, after a long experience,
 is that a man may say all that he ought to utter at
one ‘standing’ in an hour, excepting a budget speech
or a government explanation, when documents are read
The Sermon on the Mount may be read in twenty minutes ;
the Lord's Prayer takes one minute to repeat; Franklin
and Washington never spoke more than ten minutes at &
time.”

In the autumn of 1857 there was some prospect of #
vacancy for the borough of Finsbury, and a movement wa#
started in favour of Cobden as a candidate. Nothing came
of it, and it is doubtful, as we shall presently see, whether
at that moment his private interests would have allowed
him to return to public life. In the beginning of 1858 he
received one of the pleasantest of social compliments, in his
election as a member of the Atheneum Club by the special
favour of the Committee. In the course of the same year
his brother, Frederick, died at Dunford, He had suffered
such excruciating torture for some time past that to himself
death was almost welcome, but Cobden may well have felt
a sharp pang at the loss of one to whom he had been all his
life bound by the ties of so affectionate an intimacy.