ISO LIVES OF GLADSTONE AND COBDEN

in temper as Bagehot and Carlyle regarded the
introduction of Household Suffrage as a catastrophe.
" Never since the Heptarchy," wrote Carlyle, " was
there so critical an epoch in the history of England."
For Bagehot the golden age of Parliament was
gone, never to return. Yet where the Victorians
with such manifest trepidation enfranchised
thousands we to-day enfranchise tens of thousands,
sweeping away all restrictions of age, sex, and
property qualification, with as little anxiety, and
not much more thought, than we give to taking
a railway ticket, except that in taking a railway
ticket we know where we are going. One is not
sure, despite the extravagance of Carlyle, that
the advantage is not with the Victorians. They
at least were free from our enervating levity of
assent.

When one turns from the biography of Glad-
stone to that of Cobden one is at once conscious of a
contraction of the field of vision. The vast range
of interests of Mr. Gladstone's indefatigable and
inquisitive mind—a range which, as his biographer
truly observes, " moved among bulls and rescripts,
briefs and pastorals and canon law, with as much
ease as if he had been arguing about taxes and
tariffs "—is exchanged for the tenacious concentra-
tion of a self-taught man of the middle classes
upon one idea, the emancipation of the people of
England from the fetters of the Corn Laws and all
that they, for him, implied. It is indeed a complete
change of scene. The venue »is shifted from
parliament to the platform; from the episcopal
see to the humble parish; from Oxford quadrangles