36

LIFE OF COBDEN.

[oHAF

1833-6. perseverance to stick to them? I think I can. Let me
jr. 29-32. hear from you. I wished Henry to take lessons in Spanish
this winter ; it is most useful as a commercial language; the
two Americas will be our best and largest customers in spite
of tariffs.”
He had early in life felt the impulse of composition. His
first writing was a play, entitled The Phrenologisi, and Cobden
 offered it to the manager of Covent Garden Theatre.
He rejected it—* luckily for me,” Cobden added, “ for if
he had accepted it, I should probably have been a vagabond
all the rest of my life.” Another comedy still survives in
manuscript ; it is entirely without quality, and if the writer
ever looked at it in riper years, he probably had no difficulty
in understanding why the manager would have nothing to
do with it. His earliest political work consisted of letters
addressed anonymously to one of the Manchester newspapers
 (1835) on the subject of the incorporation of the
borongh. But it was the pamphlet of 1835, England,
Ireland, and America, which first showed the writer's power.
Of the political teaching of this performance we shall say
gomething in another chapter. Here we mention it as
illustrating the direction in which Cobden’s thoughts were
busy, and the kind of nourishment with which he was
strengthening his understanding during the years previous
to his final launch forth upon the sea of great affairs.
This pamphlet and that which followed it in the next
year, show by their references and illustrations that the
writer, after his settlement in Manchester in the autumn
of 1832, had made himself acquainted with the greatness
of Cervantes, the gemiality of Le Sage, the sweetness of
Spenser, the splendid majesty of Burke, no less than with
the general course of European history in the past, and the
wide forces that were then actually at work in the present.
Nina who had intimate relstions with Cobden in these earlior