man, And trammel me within the narrow span, Oh, whither shall I fly this stroke to shun! Where turn me this side death and heaven! Almost I would my course on earth were run, And all to night and silence given! I turn to man. Can he but bless and mourn? Like me he's helpless; and, like bubbles borne, We to a common haven float. To Him, the All-seeing and All-hearing One, Behold, I turn. More hid than he there's none, More silent none, none more remote. Alas, Pensylla, stay that pious tear! Was my poor soul to God's great works so dull Of Spring's approach and summer's bloom; Of autumn's blight and winter's gloom. As at the entrance of a yawning cave I shrink; so still is all and sombre: This death of sense makes life a breathing grave, A vital death, a waking slumber. Yet must I yield. Though fled for e'er the light, Though utter silence bring me double night, The wondrous fabric of a new-born world, O'er earth thy numbers shall not cease to roll Shall shine when yon proud sun is darkened, Methinks I see thee now, O bard divine! Where ripen no fair joys that are not thine, And God's full love delights on thee to shine. Still by the heavenly muses fired. And in obedience swift to high command, Thou sweep'st the sacred lyre with matchless hand, While seraphs in mute rapture round thee stand, As one by God alone inspired. And thou Beethoven wizard king of sound, Once exiled from thy realms, but not discrowned, Assist me; for my spirit, thrilling With thy surpassing harmony, is mute, As when the echoes of a dreaming lute With music weird the ear is filling. When Silence clasped thee in her dismal spell, And earth-born Music sang her sad farewell, Thy mighty genius, as in scorn, Arose in silent majesty to dwell, Where from harmonious spheres thou heardst to swell Sounds scarce by angels heard, e'en in their dreams, Which at thy bidding wove a thousand themes, Made martial bugle and wild clarion ring, IV. And now, with iridescent points of fire, 'Mid pillowing clouds and curtaining shadows. Night's ebon wings brood darkling o'er the earth; The stars gleam out, the meek-eyed moon comes forth; The evening hymn of praise, the song of mirth, Alone with darkness and my God! O thou whose shadow is but light's excess, And as but now in darkness downward whirled, New realms, where thought and fancy may rejoice; Let its long silence ne'er displace thy voice Soft flute provoked, like some lone bird of And now, O harp of the mournful voice, fare spring, To breathe love-lays of hope forlorn; Woke shrilly reed to many a pastoral note, Thrilled witching lyre, and lips melodious smote, Till earth in tuneful ether seemed to float, As first when sang the stars of morn; Till wondering angels were entranced to chime With harp and choral tongue thy strains sub lime, And bear thy name beyond the blight of time, Heaven's halls harmonious to adorn. Ah me! could I with ken angelic scan I'd deem this night a day supernal! well! As night-winds wailing down some spectred dell, In memory still my spirit haunting, I hear thine echoes burdened with the swell From the British Quarterly Review. 1. Pamphlets on England, Ireland, and equal laws which he had the wisdom to devise, the industry to elaborate, and the humanity to impose wherever ruined feudalism had left society an unsheltered wreck. And when we look down the roll of public men since the Revolution, we are constrainlittle trace has been left upon the sands of ed to ask ourselves again and again, how have held power, as it is called, in their time by the great majority of those who day! Even of Walpole and Pitt, how much is practically remembered? - less by THE saying of Lord Bacon, that Death the educated many than of Burke, Adam opens the gate of Fame, and shuts the gate Smith, Wilberforce, or Macintosh. The of Envy after it,' is but half true of politi-year gone by has seen the last of two of cians. On the evening of a statesman's our foremost men, each in his way without funeral Jealousy and Grudge drink their compeer, but in their ways so entirely diflast cup of malice; and through the aisles ferent that, save for the sake of contrast, of the cathedral Echo faintly sings, His they can hardly be spoken of together. name liveth evermore.' But is it always This is not the place or the fitting opportuso? Talleyrand, Castlereagh, Metternich, nity to speak of the illustrious minister Pozzo di Borgo, the men who plied the whose mortal career has lately closed. Nor loom of Europe's diplomatic fate at Paris would it be a gracious or a grateful task on and Vienna, and upon whose very bon mots our part, to inquire what the probable ef governments and nations hung, - who fect of time may be upon his reputation. thinks or speaks of any of them now? At present we have to perform another duty They are all gone,' in the words of Carlyle, sunk down, down, with the tumult they made; and the rolling and the trampling of ever new generations passed over them, and they hear it not any more for ever.' But there is a distinction solid and real to be drawn between the men who have spent their lives in diplomatic or executive work and those who, though they have never worn the livery of office, have either as publicists or legislators, or both, wrought important changes in the condition of their country, and in the plight of their fellowmen. One may even distinguish between the tribute which popular memory pays to the longevity of good in a man's works, and to the comparative evanescence of result in those performances of his which attract more attention and win more praise at the time. Tradition tells but a confused tale of Alfred's heroic ousting of the Dane; but through the lapse of centuries it has never faltered in its thanks to the founder of popular order and popular right, of free school learning and of jury-made law. Of the subtle statecraft of King Cromwell, how little is remembered now? but who forgets his agitator life in contraband conventicle at Yarmouth or the Fens, and the part he bore in the great strife of words at Westminster? For what is Napoleon remembered gratefully by Western Europe? Not for Marengo, Austerlitz, or Wagram, but for that imperishable code of just and that of endeavouring to recall the features of a man who, without any of the adventitious aids of birth or fortune, raised himself, in the most aristocratic and moneyworshipping country in the world, to a posi tion of influence and power the like of which no man without rank or office has of late years exercised amongst us. If Richard Cobden be forgotten, it will be because the good that men do does not live after them; and this we are bound to disbelieve. Whatever he accomplished in public life was not only professedly, but on all hands was confessedly for the uplifting of the people, and for the rendering permanently better their condition, and that of their neighbours. Purer and nobler and wider aims no man ever cherished. That he sometimes mistook the best way to their accomplishment, and sometimes miscalculated the odds and chances of the political game, is only to say that he was fallible, and at the same time enthusiastic. But his errors, now that he is gone, his severest critics cheerfully acknowledge to have been mistakes of intellect, not of heart, and of but passing moment, not of enduring evil. The family of Copden is traceable in the territorial records of Sussex through several centuries. With other yeomen of substance we find one of them offered as surety for the payment by Sir Roger de Covert, Lord of the Manor, for whose charges or fines by tenure of chivalry distress had been levied by the Crown. In 1313, Thomas Copden was sent to Westminister to serve in Parliament for the episcopal city of Chichester; and when the fear of Spanish invasion kindled the pride and pluck of all classes in the land, five and twenty pounds, a large sum in those days, were subscribed by Thomas Copden, to prepare for resisting the Armada. The like spirit warmed his illustrious descendant when, repudiating the charge of indifference to the inviolability of the realm, he said in a speech advocating naval retrenchment, -'I would never consent to our fleets being reduced to less than an equality with those of any two other maritime powers. But with that, I think, we ought to be content.' The orthography of the patronymic seems to have changed early in the seventeenth century; but the characteristic self-reliance, thrift, and contempt for social affectation remained unchanged. In 1629, when Charles I. resorted to the device for raising money, of offering knighthood to many persons among the smaller and wealthier yeomanry, with the alternative of paying so much money to be excused, Thomas Copden preferred to pay his fine rather than assume a title which would not have rendered him the happier, but which might have tended in some sort to alienate the sympathy, if not to excite the envy, of his farming neighbours. The sturdy self-respectful instinct, as we know, did not die out in his descendants. No man in our time who has been so fêted and flattered, showed less desire to forget the measure of the family hearth by which in childhood he had played, or to have it forgotten. Ambition he had abundantly; and if not covetous of riches, he was not insensible to their value, or wanting in the self-denying energy and perseverance calculated to secure the immunity from privation they afford to those he loved. But readily and without a sigh he abandoned the pursuit of wealth to nobler objects; and when the opportunity presented itself of choosing a permanent residence for the evening of his days, his heart naturally turned to the old family home, in whose quiet and seclusion he felt more happiness and pride than he could have done in the showiest suburban villa, with its bronze gates, flower-houses, and rococo finery. He used to say that he valued a man above all other things for his having a backbone: the want of almost every other member might be in some degree supplied; wig, false teeth, glass eye, stuffed arm, and wooden leg-all might be had for a trifle round the corner; but if a man was born without a backbone, you could never put it into him, or get him to stand for half an hour as if he had one. In his own demeanour, conduct, language, and life, he was the most consistently regardless man of the pretensions and of the unrealities of rank we have ever known. There was not a spark of envy or grudge in his disposition; and if ever he thought of levelling, it was in the sense only of raising up those below him, not of undermining or despoiling those above him. At the Grammar School of Midhurst, under the mastership of Mr. Philip Knight, he had the reputation of an open-hearted, unassuming boy, steady and diligent at the tasks set him, but evincing less quickness of parts than his elder brother Frederick. At twelve he was transferred to Mr. Clarkson's Seminary at Greta, in Yorkshire, where he remained three years. He had no turn for classical acquirements, the value of which in after years he was rather disposed to depreciate. What he loved best, and what he most completely mastered, was geography, of which he probably knew more than all the rest of his classfellows put together. The value he set on this branch of study is noticeable throughout all his after-life. He was the comparative anatomist of modern civilization; and not only believed in the worth of international sympathy as a humanizing sentiment, but in the policy and wisdom of international knowledge as indispensable to a full reciprocity of benefits. At a public meeting a friend incidentally made use of the expression once, that as it was not in the sight of Heaven good for man to be alone, neither was it right or wise for a community to try to dwell apart. He cheered the expression vehemently, and afterwards commended in warm terms the maxim conveyed in the illustration. To use his own words, No nation, however strong or good, can afford to play the hermit.' No wonder that he continued throughout life to prize what had been, as it were, in his mind the ground-plan of his whole political system. In his last speech at Rochdale he dwelt at considerable length upon the neglect of geographical teaching in our schools, and told the tale of his search, when visiting Attica, for the stream of the storied Ilissus, and of his amusement when at last he discovered the insignificant brook hardly containing water enough to serve the purposes of some dozen laundresses: and yet, as he chidingly observed, too many of our fine young English gentlemen who, fresh from College, undertake to legislate for the wants of the Empire and its relations with the rest of the civilized world, know more of the course of this classic land-drain than they do of the Amazon or the Mississippi. For this he was soundly rated in the columns of the daily and weekly press, as if he had been guilty of inculcating some darkening heresy, or wished to discredit scholastic learning. But this was not his meaning or his aim. He thought indeed that the uniform drill of upper class intellect in Greek prosody, Latin verse, and the religion of Olympus, was an inadequate substitute for modern knowledge, in the youth of a ruling class. No man had a greater respect for true scholarship of any and of every kind; but he knew that one-half the young men who, by the right divine of territorial rank or fortune, enter Parliament at an early age, have never willingly spent an hour in the study of the Classics, which at Eton and Christchurch they regard simply as the plague of their idle lives. And being a man wholly devoid of superstition, whether social or educational, he could not help laughing aloud at that which prescribes a uniform system of mental training, so barren of flower or fruit, to the exclusion or neglect of teachings that might prove less irksome and that might fairly be expected to serve a more practical purpose. tory, as his limited opportunities enabled him to obtain and very early his mind became attracted by the study of those branches of knowledge which furnish the materials of industrial philosophy. Opinions he could be hardly said to have thought of forming. Although, if we knew all, it is probable that we should be able to trace very early the seemingly haphazard shedding of seed, which in his genial mind quickly struck root and slowly but steadily grew, although unnoticed and unnoticeable for many a year to come. In the fluctuations of trade the old merchant proved unfortunate; while his studious nephew, having belied his forebodings and thriven as well as risen in life, had the gratification of repaying his anxious though undiscerning care by contributing to his comfort in his declining years. On quitting his uncle's warehouse, young Cobden undertook the duties of a commercial traveller, and showed so much activity and discrimination in that capacity, that he was early enabled to obtain a junior partner's share in a house trading both in Manchester and London. He threw himself with energy into the development of the particular branch of manufacture with which his name was subsequently associatAt sixteen he began his unindentured ap- ed; and in a few years the firm, mainly prenticeship to trade under his uncle, who owing to his personal skill, perseverance, was an extensive warehouseman in East- and enterprise, had acquired a high reputacheap. The knowledge derivable from tion. In his leisure hours he continued to books was regarded at that time as wholly enlarge his stock of general information, out of place in a youth bound to follow bus- and from the outset felt longings he could iness and nothing else. There might be not wholly restrain, to have his say about nothing actually wrong in his skimming what was publicly passing around him. He through a novel once in a way; and of saw the children of the working classes course it was all right to read a chapter or growing up without any species of instruca Psalm on a Sunday night before going to tion, and when they drew near the verge bed; always provided that he was not too of maturity left without any species of sleepy to forget to put out the candle, a intellectual relaxation, or any means of circumstance fairly presumable. But as for qualifying themselves to enjoy it. He apstudy of any kind, or the collecting of infor- plied himself with zeal to the local remation, even about trade, from books, inedy of both evils. His voice, his pen, pamphlets, or newspapers, the thing was and his purse were devoted to the encourdeemed an absurdity or an affectation; agement of free schools in Manchester; and and when the beardless youth betrayed he was one of the founders of the Athenæleanings that way, he incurred at first pity um in that city, one of the first institutions for his want of sense, and then reproof for of the kind established in England. For the his obdurate wilfulness in thus misusing purpose of extending the connections of his his time. Luckily for himself and for the house he made several journeys abroad, by world, however, he still went his way, work- which his views were greatly expanded, and ing hard and well by daylight and by dusk, as he used himself to say, his islander vaniand never neglecting the business of his ty and pretension cut down. Love of counrelative till the doors of the warehouse try was with him not an exclusive, but a closed. But when his companions had be- preferential love. He did not want to grow taken themselves to the amusements befit-rich himself by overreaching others or by ting their time of life, or were glad to enjoy grinding them down, and he did not want an early sleep, he loved to occupy himself his country to do as it would not be done with such books of travels, biography, and his- by. He had a thorough faith in the doc |