Div OF DOBOEN.

[crarp,

1824. of hig life. Between Frederick Cobden and Richard there
Zr. 20, always existed the warmest friendship, and when the former
found a situation in London, their intercourse was constant
and intimate. There were three younger brothers, Charles,
Miles, and Henry ; and Richard Cobden was no sooner in
receipt of a salary, than he at once took the place of a father to
them, besides doing all that he could to brighten the shabby
poverty of the home at Westmeon. Whenever he had a
holiday, he spent it there; a hamper of such good cheer as
his purse could afford was never missing at Christmas ; and
on the long Sundays in summer he knew no happier diversion
 than to walk out to meet his father at some roadside
inn on the wide Surrey heaths, midway between Alton and
the great city. His little parchment-bound diary of
expenses at this time shows him to us as learning to dance
and to box, playing cards with alternating loss and gain,
going now and again to Vauxhall Gardens, visiting the
theatre to see Charles Mathews, buying Brougham on
Popular Education, Franklin’s Hssays, and Childe Harold.
The sums are puny enough, but a gentle spirit seems still
to breathe in the poor faded lines and quaint French in
which he made his entries, as we read of the little gifts to
his father and brothers, and how he is debtor by charité, 1s.
—donné un pawvre gargon, ld.—un pauvre gargon, 2d.
By-and-by the sombre Shadow fell upon them all. In
1825 the good mother of the house helped to murse a
neighbour’s sick child, in the midst of an epidemic of
typhoid ; she caught the fever, and died at the age of eight
and forty. “Our sorrow would be torment,” Frederick
Cobden wrote to his father, “if we could not reflect on our
conduct towards that dear soul, without calling to mind one
instance in which we had wilfully given her pain.” And
with this gentle solace they seem to have had good right to
soothe their affliction.