042 LIFR OF OOBDRN.

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the outcome of an extremely mteresting mind, and unlike
English conversation in being quite free from commonplaces.
On religious questions he was for the most part gilent.
When he was in the country, he went to church like other
people. All his personal habits were in the highest degree
simple and frugal. He was indifferent to the pleasures of
the table, he did not care to acquire fine things of any
kind, and he had none of the passion of the collector
Politics were the one commanding interest of his life.
But it is well once more to note that what Cobden talked
about and cared for was real politics, not the game of party
Politics in his sense meant the large workings of policy, nob
the manceuvres of members of Parliament, When the newspaper
 was unfolded in the morning, that furnished him and
his friends or his guests with topics for the day. Events all
over the world were deliberately discussed in relation to wide
and definite general principles; their bearings were worked
out in the light of what Cobden conceived to be the great
economical and social movements of the world. This is what
makes a real school in politics. It was in the same spirib
that Cobden read books and talked with bookish men. His
point of view was always actual, not in the sense of the
vulgar practical man, but social and political. When he
read a book, he read it as all reading should be done, with
a view to life and practice, and not in the way of refined
self-indulgence. The Life of Eliot made him think of the
state of the franchise in those old times, and Motley’s
History of the Netherlands, which interested him greatly;
suggested to him that Queen Elizabeth carried her aversion
to European crusading in the Palmerstonian sense almost
too far. To the Ilyssus we may confess that Cobden was 2

s «Why, when I read Motley’s History of the Rise of the Dutch Republic
— an admirable book, which everybody should read—when I read the history
of the Netherlands, and when I see how that struggling community, with