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LIFE OF COBDEN, [cmar. IF

1835-6. of a fine style It would be nearer the truth to say th?
Ar. 81.8. our classical training is more aptly calenlated to destroy bt
qualities of good writing and fine speaking, than any oth?
system that could have been contrived. Those qualiti®
depend principally, in men of ordinary endowment, up®
% certain large freedom and spontaneousness, and ner
upon a strong habit of observing things before word?
These are exactly the habits of mind which our way °
teaching, or rather of not teaching, Latin and Greek ©
evitably chills and represses in any one in whom liters!)
faculty is not absolutely irrepressible. What is striking *
Cobden is that after a lost and wasted childhood, a yout!
of drudgery in a warehouse, and an early manhood pass’
emid the rather vulgar associations of the commercial ®
veller, he should at the age of one and thirty have stepp®’
forth the master of a written style, which in boldne®
freedom, correctness, and persuasive moderation, was 20
surpassed by any man then living. He had taken pains wit
his mind, and had been a diligent and extensive reader, bv!
he had never studied language for its own sake.
It was fortunate for him that, instead of blunting be
spontaneous faculty of expression by minute study of be
verbal peculiarities of a Liysias or an Isocrates, he ghoul
have gone to the same school of active public interests and
real things in which those fine orators had in their differe?’
degrees acquired so happy a union of homeliness with purity
and of amplitude with measure. These are the very qualiti®
that we notice in Cobden’s earliest pages; they evident!
sprang from the writer's singular directness of eye, and
eager and disinterested sincerity of social feeling, undi®
turbed as both these gifts fortunately were by the vic®
of literary self-consciousness.