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JOHN MORLEY

Life of Richard Cobden

In an age when many have gained the double distinction of eminence in statesmanship and in letters, the name of Lord Morley stands out as that of a man so illustrious in both provinces that it is hard to decide in which he has earned the greater fame.  We are here concerned with him as a brilliant English man of letters.  The “Life of Cobden” was published in 1881, when John Morley was in the height of his literary activity.  Born at Blackburn on December 24, 1838, and educated at Cheltenham and Oxford, he had entered journalism, had edited the “Pall Mall Gazette” and the “Fortnightly Review,” and had followed up his first book—­a monograph on Burke—­by a remarkable study of Voltaire, and by his work entitled “On Compromise.”  Political preoccupations drew him somewhat away from literature after 1881; but in 1901 he published his book on Cromwell, which was followed two years later by the monumental “Life of Gladstone.”

I.—­On the Road

Heyshott is a hamlet in a sequestered corner of West Sussex, not many miles from the Hampshire border.  Here, in an old farmhouse, known as Dunford, Richard Cobden was born on June 3, 1804.  His ancestors were yeomen of the soil, and, it is said, with every appearance of truth, that the name can be traced in the annals of the district as far back as the fourteenth century.

Cobden’s father, a man of soft and affectionate disposition, but wholly without the energy of affairs, met with financial disaster in 1814, and relatives charged themselves with the maintenance of his dozen children.  Richard was sent by his mother’s brother-in-law, a merchant in London, to a school in Yorkshire.  Here he remained for five years, a grim and desolate time, of which he could never afterwards endure to speak.  In 1819 he was received as a clerk in his uncle’s warehouse in Old Change; and at the age of twenty-one he was advanced from the drudgery of the warehouse to the glories of the road.  What made the life of a traveller specially welcome to Cobden was the gratification that it offered to the master-passion of his life, an insatiable desire to know the affairs of the world.

In 1826, his employer failed, and for some months Cobden had to take unwelcome holiday.  In September he found a situation, and again set out on the road with his samples of muslin and calico prints.  Two years afterwards, in 1828, he and two friends determined to begin business on their own account.  They arranged with a firm of Manchester calico-printers to sell goods on commission; and so profitable was the enterprise that in 1831 the partners determined to print their own goods, and took an old factory at Sabden in Lancashire.