where men spring from nothing; his trading
career has been sufficiently prosperous and extraordinary, not to be
rendered incredible by ridiculous inventions of friends or foes. About
the locale of his birth and residence, of his origin and antecedents, Mr
Cobden himself ever maintains a guarded silence, as if, with
aristocratical airs growing with his fortunes, he were ashamed, and would
cast the slough of family poverty and plebeianship; or perhaps he
calculates on leaving the world, Sussex at least, hereafter to dispute
the honours of his paternity like another Homer.

Mr Cobden is but a type, not of the highest cast either, of the
manufacturing operatives of Lancashire. You will find his equal in one at
least out of every ten of the adult factory workmen of Lancashire, whose
wits are sharpened by everyday conflict and debate in clubs and publics;
you will often meet his superior in those self-educated classes. We have
not unfrequently read speeches at public meetings by intelligent
operatives in Lancashire, which showed a more profound acquaintance with,
and greater powers of development of the _rationale_ of political and
economical philosophy, in single instances, than can be discovered in the
mass of harangues poured forth by Mr Cobden, were the flowers ever so
carefully culled and separated from the loads of trashy weed. His forte
consists in a coarse but dauntless intrepidity, with which respectability
and intellect shrink from encounter. The country squire, educated and
intelligent, but retiring and truth-loving, retreats naturally from
contest with a bold, abusive, and unscrupulous demagogue; even the party
he serves, holds off from contact and communion with him. He never quails,
therefore, because never matched, unless before Mr Ferrand, the fearless
member for Knaresborough--a man most ill-used, even abandoned by the very
party he so signally serves; yet who is never slow, as occasion offers, to
chastise the cur which snarls whilst it crouches before him. The eloquence
of Mr Cobden is of that vulgarly-exciting sort, well adapted to the level
of the audiences, the scum of town populations, to which it is habitually
addressed. Without the education of the late Henry Hunt, he has quite as
much capacity and more tact, with the single exception, that when
attempting to soar to the metaphorical he is apt to enact the ludicrous
blunders of Astley's clown aping the affected pomposity of the master; as
_v.g._ in the