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.

Cobden's imagination was struck by the busy life of the county with
which his name was destined to be so closely bound up. "Manchester," he
writes with enthusiasm, "is the place for all men of bargain and
business." His pen acquires a curiously exultin