1838.
HT. 82.

LIN. .

©" JOBDEN.

[cELr.

voluminous and untiring letter-writer. In the hottest time
of the agitation against the Corn Laws, he no sooner fiung
off his overcoat on reaching the inn after a long journey or &
boisterous meeting, than he called for pen and ink, and sat
lown to write letters of argument, remongtrance, persuasion,
direction. And when, as now, he was travelling for relaxation,
 the same impulse was irresistibly strong upon him, the
same expansive desire to communicate to others his impressions,
 ideas, and experiences, “I am writing this,” he says
on one occasion, “whilst sailing down the Nile on my return
bo Alexandria, and it is penned upon no better desk than
my knees, while sitting cross-legged upon my mattress, in
the cabin of a boat not high enough in the roof to allow me
even to stand.”’* No physical inconvenience and no need of
repose ever dulled his willingness either to hear or to speak.
The biographer’s only embarrassment is difficulty of selection
from superabundant material. Journals and letters alike
show the same man, of quick observation, gay spirits, and
a disposition that, on its serious side, was energetically
reflective rather than contemplative. I wish that I could
reproduce his journals, but they are too copious for the
limits of my space ; and the statements of commercial fact
which they contain are no longer true, while the currents
of trade which Cobden took such pains to trace out,
have long since shifted their direction. He was an eager
and incessant questioner, and yet his journals show a man
who is acquiring knowledge, not with the elaborate conscientiousness
 of a set purpose, but with the ease of natural
and spontaneous interest, There is no overdone earnestness
 ; life is not crushed out of us by the sledge-hammer of
he statistical bore ; there is the charm of disengagement,
nnd the faculty of disengagement is one of the secrets of the
most effective kind of character. Elaborate inquiries as to
* To Qharles Cobden, Jap. 8, 1887.