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COLFIDENOE TH HIS PROSPHOTS.

the possession of millions would greatly alter my habits of
sXpense,”
As we might have expected in so buoyant and overflowing
A temperament, moments of reaction were not absent, though
the shadow was probably as swiftly transient with him as
with any msn that ever lived. In one of the letters of this
period he writes to his brother: —1 know I must rise
rapidly if not too heavily weighted. Another doleful letter
from poor M. [one of his sisters] came yesterday. Oh, this
is the only portion of the trials of my life that I could not
go through again—the ordeal would send me to Bedlam |
Well, I drown the past in still hoping for the future, but
God knows whether futurity will be as great a cheat as ever.
I sometimes think it will. I tell you candidly, I am somebimes
 out of spirits, and have need of co-operation, or
Heaven knows yet what will become of my fine castles in the
alr. So you must bring sprife——:  dte—spirits.”
Few men indeed have been more heavily weighted at the
start than Cobden was. His family were still dogged and
tracked from place to place by the evil genius of slipshod
fortune. In 1829 Frederick Cobden began the business of a
timber merchant ga’ Barnet, but unhappily the undertaking
was as little successful as other things to which he ever put
his hand. The little business at Farnham had failed, and
bad been abandoned. William Cobden went to live with hig
son at Barnet, and amused a favourite passion by watching
the hundred and twenty coaches whick each day whirled up
and down the great north road. Nothing prospered. Death
carried off a son and a daughter in the same year (1830).
Frederick lost health, aud he lost his brother's money, and
spirits followed, He and his father make a strong instance
of the deep saying of Shakespeare’s Enobarbus, how men’s
judgments are a parcel of their fortunes, and things outward
draw the inward onaliby afar them to suffer all alike,

183%.

Ar, 28.