[20

LIF® OF COBDEN.

[oBAf

1838. gignificance. He could not even understand the urgency
Ar. 34. of more prudent friends that he should retwrn. 1 was 1
conceit nor conscious defiance, but the incapacity inbo?®
in so active and serious an intelligence, of contented!
muffling itself even for half a day under idle forms. B
was born a political man; his most real interests in bb
world were wholly in affairs of government and institution
and his dominant passion was a passion for improvement
His whole mind was possessed by the high needs and gros
opportunities of society, as the minds of some other mer
have been possessed by the aspirations of religion, and
he had as little humour for the small things of world}
punctilio as Calvin or as Knox may have had.
I have already described the relation of some of Cobden’
ideas to those of George Combe. It was, above all othe!
things, for the sake of the prospect which it held out o
supplying a sure basis and a trustworthy guide in the
intricate and encumbered path of national education, the!
he was drawn for a time to Combe’s system of phrenology
His letters during the years of which we are now speaking
abound pretty freely in the terms of that crude catalogue
but with him they are less like the jargon of the phreno”
logical fanatic of those days, than the good-humoured
language of a man who believes in a general way that
there is something in it. In 1835 he had been instruments
in forming a phrenological society in Manchester, and the
first of a series of letters to Combe is one in 1836, pressing
him to deliver a course of lectures in that town. It if
teresting as an illustration of the amazing growth both
in rational tolerance and scientific opinion, when we com”
pare the very moderate heterodoxy of phrenology with the
doctrines that in our own day are publicly discussed without
alarm. “The Society which we profess to have here,”
Cobden writes, “is not well supported, and for nearly