Jap. 113

LATICO BEIRE.

NG

grievances. The agitation was successful. The duty was 1829.
taken off in the spring of 1831, and between 1831 and 1841 Zr. 25.
the trade doubled itself,
This great change fully warranted the new enterprise of
Cobden and his partners. They took over from the Forts
au old calico-printing factory at Sabden,—a remote village
on the banks of a tributary of the Calder, near the ruined
gateways and chapel of the Cistercian abbey at Whalley in
Lancashire, and a few miles from where are now the fine
mills and flourishing streets of Blackburn. The higher part
of the Sabden valley runs up into the famous haunted Forest
of Pendle ; and notwithstanding the tall chimneys that may
be seen dimly in the distance of the plain, the visitor to this
sequestered spot may well feel as if the old world of white
monks and forest witches still lingered on the bleak hillsides.
 Cobden was all with the new world. His imagination
had evidently been struck by the busy life of the county
with which his name was destined to be go closely bound
up. Manchester, he writes with enthusiasm, is the place
for all men of bargain snd business. His pen acquires a
curiously exulting animation, as he describes the bustle
of ite streets, the quaintness of its dialect, the abundance
of its capital, and the sturdy veterans with a hundred
thousand pounds in each pocket, who might be seen in the
svening smoking clay pipes and calling for brandy.andwater
 in the bar-parlours of homely taverns. He declared
his conviction, from what he had seen, that if he were
stripped naked and turned into Lancashire with only his
experience for a capital, he would still make a large fortune,
He would not give anybody sixpence to guarantee him
wealth, if he only lived! And so forth, in a vein of selfconfidence
 which he himself well described as Napoleonic.
“I am ever solicitous,” he wrote to his brother (Jan. 80.
Letters to Froderick Cobden, Aug, 11, 1831. Tan. 6 1822, &o.