ment.

sive figure, a large head, a handsome and expressive face. His voice was powerful, resonant, clear, with a peculiar vibration in it which lent unspeakable effect to any passages of pathos or of scorn. His style of speaking was exactly what a conventional demagogue's ought not to be. It was pure to austerity; it was stripped of all superfluous ornaIt never gushed or foamed. It never allowed itself to be mastered by passion. The first peculiarity that struck the listener was its superb self-restraint. The orator at his most powerful passages appeared as if he were rather keeping in his strength than taxing it with effort. His voice was, for the most part, calm and measured; he hardly ever indulged in much gesticulation. He never, under the pressure of whatever emotion, shouted or stormed. The fire of his eloquence was a white-heat, intense, consuming, but never sparkling or sputtering. He had an admirable gift of humor and a keen ironical power. He had read few books, but of those he read he was a master. The English Bible and Milton were his chief studies. His style was probably formed, for the most part, on the Bible; for although he may have moulded his general way of thinking and his simple, strong morality on the lessons he found in Milton, his mere language bore little trace of Milton's stately classicism with its Hellenized and Latinized terminology, but was above all things Saxon and simple. Bright was a man of the middle-class. His family were Quakers of a somewhat austere mould. They were manufacturers of carpets in Rochdale, Lancashire, and had made considerable money in their business. John Bright, therefore, was raised above the temptations which often beset the eloquent young man who takes up a democratic cause in a country like ours; and, as our public opinion goes, it probably was to his advantage, when first he made his appearance in Parliament, that he was well known to be a man of some means, and not a clever and needy adventurer.

Mr. Bright himself has given an interesting account of his first meeting with Mr. Cobden:

"The first time I became acquainted with Mr. Cobden was in connection with the great question of education. I went over to Manchester to call upon him and invite him to come to Rochdale to speak at a meeting about to be held in the

school-room of the Baptist Chapel in West Street. I found him in his counting-house. I told him what I wanted; his countenance lighted up with pleasure to find that others were working in the same cause. He, without hesitation, agreed to come. He came, and he spoke; and though he was then so young a speaker, yet the qualities of his speech were such as remained with him so long as he was able to speak at all-clearness, logic, a conversational eloquence, a persuasiveness which, when combined with the absolute truth there was in his eye and in his countenance, became a power it was almost impossible to resist."

Still more remarkable is the description Mr. Bright has given of Cobden's first appeal to him to join in the agitation for the repeal of the Corn-laws:

"I was in Leamington, and Mr. Cobden called on me. I was then in the depths of grief-I may almost say of despair for the light and sunshine of my house had been extinguished. All that was left on earth of my young wife, except the memory of a sainted life and a too brief happiness, was lying still and cold in the chamber above us. Mr. Cobden called on me as his friend and addressed me, as you may suppose, with words of condolence. After a time he looked up and said: "There are thousands and thousands of homes in England at this moment where wives and mothers and children are dying of hunger. Now, when the first paroxysm of your grief is passed, I would advise you to come with me, and we will never rest until the Corn-laws are repealed.""

The invitation thus given was cordially accepted, and from that time dates the almost unique fellowship of these two men, who worked together in the closest brotherhood, who loved each other as not all brothers do, who were associated so closely in the public mind that until Cobden's death the name of one was scarcely ever mentioned without that of the other. There was something positively romantic about their mutual attachment. Each led a noble life; each was in his own way a man of genius; each was simple and strong. Rivalry between them would have been impossible, although they were every day being compared and contrasted by both friendly and unfriendly critics. Their gifts were admirably suited to make them powerful allies. Each had

anything like his compannot the tones of scorn, of The two together made a

something that the other wanted. Bright had not Cobden's winning persuasiveness nor his surprising ease and force of argument. But Cobden had not ion's oratorical power. He had pathos, of humor, and of passion. genuine power in the House of Commons and on the platform. Mr. Kinglake, who is as little in sympathy with the general political opinions of Cobden and Bright as any man well could be, has borne admirable testimony to their argumentative power and to their influence over the House of Commons: "These two orators had shown with what a strength, with what a masterly skill, with what patience, with what a high courage, they could carry a scientific truth through the storms of politics. They had shown that they could arouse and govern the assenting thousands who listened to them with delight-that they could bend the House of Commons that they could press their creed upon a Prime-minister, and put upon his mind so hard a stress, that after awhile he felt it to be a torture and a violence to his reason to have to make a stand against them. Nay, more. Each of these gifted men had proved that he could go bravely into the midst of angry opponents, could show them their fallacies one by one, destroy their favorite theories before their very faces, and triumphantly argue them down." It was, indeed, a scientific truth which, in the first instance, Cobden and Bright undertook to force upon the recognition of a Parliament composed in great measure of the very men who were taught to believe that their own personal and class interests were bound up with the maintenance of the existing economical creed. Those who hold that because it was a scientific truth the task of its advocates ought to have been easy, will do well to observe the success of the resist ance which has been thus far offered to it in almost every country but England alone.

These men had many assistants and lieutenants well worthy to act with them and under them. Mr. W. J. Fox, for instance, a Unitarian minister of great popularity and remarkable eloquence, seemed at one time almost to divide public admiration as an orator with Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright. Mr. Milner Gibson, who had been a Tory, went over to the movement, and gave it the assistance of trained Par

liamentary knowledge and very considerable debating skill In the Lancashire towns the League had the advantage of being officered, for the most part, by shrewd and sound men of business, who gave their time as freely as they gave their money to the advancement of the cause. It is curious to compare the manner in which the Anti-Corn-law agitation was conducted with the manner in which the contemporary agitation in Ireland for the repeal of the Union was carried on. In England the agitation was based on the most strictly business principles. The leaders spoke and acted as if the League itself were some great commercial firm, which was bound, above all things, to fulfil its promises and keep to the letter as well as the spirit of its engagements. There was no boasting; there was no exaggeration; there were no appeals to passion; no romantic rousings of sentimental emotion. The system of the agitation was as clear, straightforward, and business-like as its purpose. In Ireland there were monster meetings, with all manner of dramatic and theatric effects-with rhetorical exaggeration, and vehement appeal to passion and to ancient memory of suffering. The cause was kept up from day to day by assurances of near success so positive that it is sometimes hard to believe those who made them could themselves have been deceived by them. No doubt the difference will be described by many as the mere result of the difference between the one cause and the other; between the agitation for Free-trade, clear, tangible, and practical, and that for repeal of the Union, with its shadowy object and its visionary impulses. But a better explanation of the difference will be found in the different natures to which an appeal had to be made. It is not by any means certain that O'Connell's cause was a mere shadow; nor will it appear, if we study the criticism of the time, that the guides of public opinion who pronounced the repeal agitation absurd and ludicrous had any better words at first for the movement against the Corn-law. Cobden and Bright on the one side, O'Connell on the other, knew the audiences they had to address. It would have been impossible to stir the blood of the Lancashire artisan by means of the appeals which went to the very heart of the dreamy, sentimental, impassioned Celt of the South of Ireland. The Munster peasant would have understood little of such clear,