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If Cobbett left England in a disturbed state, the lapse of two years had not improved its condition. The Manchester riot had taken place, and Yorkshire sympathy with the rioters had received a check in the deposition of Lord Fitzwilliam from the lord-lieutenancy. Cobbett continued his old life, wrote, quarrelled, tried to get into Parliament, and failed. His speech at the close of his contest at Preston must have delighted his audience: Gentlemen, I have done much good to you by coming. I have sweated your tyrants; I have bled them; I have made the silly honourable (the late Lord Derby) throw 15,000l. among you, and that's no joke, for though these lords have too much land, they have not too much money. I have tickled the Captain too: he must have pledged his half-pay to keep open houses for you, and now he must live on plates of beef and goes of gin for the next seven years.' Failure was not likely to daunt him, his old confidence in himself continued, and he tilted as gallantly as ever against the placemen, the borough-mongers, and the sinecurists. No one got praise from him, from that great, snorting bawler, Mr. Pitt,' 'this old porpoise of a Bourbon, Louis Philippe,' the impudent spouter Canning,'base Burke,' down to the 'lank Whigs of 1830, lank and merciless as hungry wolves.'

It was not until 1832 that the doors of the House of Commons were opened to him as member for Oldham, which he represented up to his death, which took place three years later. One anecdote of Cobbett will not be out of place here. A few weeks before his entry into Parliament, he had, when in Scotland, promised his friends to pay them a second visit and lecture to them; after his election, however, he considered such an occupation as lecturing quite unfitted for the exalted sphere to which he had been called, and he therefore refused to redeem the promise he had given.

Important as was his work as a politician, it is as a typical Englishman and a writer of English that Cobbett attracts and interests and will live amongst us. 'Damn politics,' he writes to Dr. Mitford from the farm at Botley. Is Snip with pup yet?—a matter of far more importance than whether the Prince of Asturias is to be hanged or not.' You can picture him in his red waistcoat plodding about his farm, stopping up pathways, inclosing land and stocking it with hares and pheasants after the fashion of the most approved preserver of game. Unlike Dr. Johnson, at least as regards early rising, he practised what he preached. He got up early, he lived simply, he never spent more than thirty-five minutes during the day on all his meals, and he lived for a year on a mutton-chop a day. He was English in his dislike of novelties, of new-fangled theories, of inventions, of philosophies. He disliked clubs; you should read the newspaper only at home. check-population parson,' and Jenner, and

He hated Malthus, 'the spoke of the 'good old

fashioned seam-giving and dimple-dipping small-pox.' Tea and

potatoes he abused as though they were Burdett and Castlereagh. In all kind household offices, in the mutual tendernesses and ministrations of wedded life, he took more than a man's ordinary share. When his wife lay ill in Philadelphia and could not sleep on account of the noise the dogs made around their house, he sallied forth, and, barefooted that he might not disturb her, on the hot bricks of the causeway, so hot that they burnt his feet, he walked backwards and forwards the livelong night, throwing stones and thus keeping the dogs at a distance.

His papers were often written amidst the racket and noise of children while he was writing his first book he was rocking the cradle, and to the great object of making his children's lives happy and innocent he made everything give way. A happy marriage prompted some of his finest sentences, and no high priest of Venus ever celebrated love's praises in more inspired strains.

Love, he said, rescued me from a state of horrible slavery; placed the whole of my time at my own disposal; made me as free as air; removed every restraint upon the operations of my mind, naturally disposed to communicate its thoughts to others; and gave me for my leisure hours a companion, who, though deprived of all opportunity of what is called learning, had so much good sense, so much useful knowledge, was so innocent, so just in all her ways, so pure in thought, word, and deed, so disinterested, so generous, so devoted to me and her children, so free from all disguise and withal so beautiful, and so talkative and in a voice so sweet, so cheering, that 1 must, seeing the health and the capacity which it had pleased God to give me, have been a criminal if I had done much less than that which I have done, and I have always said that if my country feel any gratitude for my labours, that gratitude is due to her full as much as to me."

As a writer of pure English, Cobbett stands out almost unrivalled, and hundreds of passages might be quoted from his writings which are masterpieces of diction. He did not draw his illustrations from the fantasies of a perplexed brain, but from that nature which is always ready to reveal her secrets to those who love her. You will find his descriptions of scenery as true as those of Sir Walter Scott, and flowers and trees and coppices and wolds and woodlands and the birds and beasts that belong to them, are all put in their proper places. His word-paintings savour sometimes of almost an excessive realism. We should be contented in describing some noise to say it was like the squeaking of pigs. Cobbett says it was like the squeaking of little pigs, when the sow is lying on them.' In another passage, after rating the literary hack below the carpenter or the hedger, he stigmatises him as a miserable fribble of a wretch who could hardly disentangle his carcase if clasped by a couple of stout brambles, and who hardly knows a rough sheep-dog from a sheep.' All his illustrations are English. He was ever thinking of England when he wrote; he gloried in her past, in the husbandmen who tilled her fields, in the architects who reared her cathedrals, the monks who succoured and fed the poor in their stately

buildings; and if he lamented over the times in which he lived, it was because the comparison he drew between the reigns of the Edwards and the Georges was in his eyes unfavourable to the latter.

Sixty years of struggles and aspirations have brought us nearer what we conceive to be the light. Our hope is that it is no ignis fatuus, no dancing meteor of the marshes that we follow. I remember travelling amidst exquisite scenery, under cloudless skies, in warmth and sunshine, along the banks of the Mediterranean, when a friend of mine, pointing to the snow that was gleaming on the peaks of the Alps above us, said, 'That is to remind us we are mortals.' So in spite of all the luxuries of our lives we have chill prospects on every side to tell us how little our vaunted improvements are worth, and how thin the veneer is of civilisation. Our railways and schools. and libraries and clubs are monuments of our energy and wealth, but they are only means to an end, the attainment of happiness by the community at large. A nation wants pleasures as well as work. To play wisely, as Mr. Ruskin puts it, is a great achievement, and we are losing the capacity as well as the conditions necessary for healthy play. Nature gave us pure air and water; we have made them a curse to ourselves and to our neighbours. Science discovers to us her secrets, but we laugh at her instructions and treat them with contempt, and fifty years hence the same surprise will be felt by our descendants on reading the accounts of our habits and society that we feel when we study the history of our grandfathers who lived under the last of the Georges.

CHARLES MILNES GASKELL.

A COURT OF LUNACY.

An impression has fixed itself on the public mind that our Lunacy Laws are inadequate for the cure of disease, insufficient for the protection of the subject.

The suspicion has been confirmed by trials which have recently occurred, which demonstrate the facility with which a man can be withdrawn from society, through the action of interested relatives or the venality of a medical practitioner.

In one the remarkable talent displayed in refuting the charge negatived the plea of insanity, and proved how flimsy is the garb which veils personal liberty. The signature of a magistrate, the countersign of a physician, and the man disappears.

Two cases of more than local interest will illustrate the dangerous laxity of our Lunacy Laws. In the one, the imputation was too flagrant to secure the acquiescence of the clergyman or the sanction of the doctor; more pliant accomplices were discovered: incarceration was the result. In the other the victim was hurried off without previous warning, and the first hint of his destination was conveyed to him on the signboard-Lunatic Asylum.'

The measure before the late Parliament was a step in the right direction, but the blot on the Bill is the allowing the magistrate any power whatever to adjudicate in matters of insanity. It is impossible for a man unskilled in the science of mental pathology to discriminate between the various shades of the malady. He may be misled by the advice of the physician, or the misrepresentations of interested parties; and the painful responsibility rests upon him either of casting upon society an element of danger, or the confinement of the harmless sufferer from mental derangement.

We remember the case of a man of varied and extensive learning employed by Government in difficult and abstruse calculations, but, dominated with the idea that his body was made of crockery, refused to discharge the duties of his office in a recumbent posture. Here was an instance of a man in the full vigour of intellectual powers, whose talents were devoted to the service of his country, but, influenced by harmless delusions, was liable at any moment to be excluded from society, through the ignorance or incapacity of a magistrate.

VOL. XIX.-No. 108.

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Lunacy Commissioners may act as a check upon the abuse of imprisonment; but the fact remains, that a man can be immured within the precincts of an asylum, surrounded by horrors which may nourish the disease which it is the object to avert.

The same objection to the jurisdiction of magistrates applies to our courts of justice. Neither judge, jury, nor counsel is qualified to pronounce an opinion on the sanity of an individual. Probably not one amongst the number have made mental disease the object of study; and there may be a miscarriage of justice, either in the extraordinary ingenuity which the insane so often display in baffling the arguments of counsel, or in that nervousness of demeanour natural to a man standing before a judge whose verdict may consign him to liberty or restraint.

As long as tribunals exist incompetent to discharge the duties of their office, we can expect neither safety to the individual nor justice to the public.

We require separate jurisdiction for the trial of insanity—a court presided over by a judge sufficiently conversant with mental disease to enable him to draw the line between the capacity of a man to manage himself and his incapacity to manage his affairs. If mentally incompetent for the business of life, his property should be guarded by law; if a harmless lunatic, he might be allowed the enjoyment of personal liberty, much to his own benefit and with no risk to society. A provision to enable a court to act as trustee to a man's estate will for the future clear our asylums of numbers who never ought to be in confinement, but whom the elasticity of our Lunacy Laws has enabled relatives to imprison, the only resource hitherto at their disposal for the preservation of property. That the task would be a delicate one admits of no doubt. There exists a natural disinclination to interfere with the management or devolution of property; but mental weakness may become the prey of the sharper; the religious fanatic may transfer an estate from its legitimate course to enrich a dangerous or foolish superstition.

The verdict should be accompanied with a registration of the case; the parties who signed the warrant should be responsible for the care of the individual; no change should be allowed from one place to another without the sanction of the court, to obviate the possibility of the object being lost sight of in the recesses of some foreign asylum.

But when the sentence is pronounced which settles the fate of the individual, his future becomes a matter for grave consideration.

To private asylums we entertain a decided objection. We wish to cast no imputation on the management of the receptacles for the insane; the comforts may be in excess of the wants of daily life; every kindness which philanthropy dictates may be lavished upon them,

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