improved it wherever he went by experience, by observation, and by
conversation with all manner of men. He became one of the most effective
and persuasive popular speakers ever known in English agitation. He was
not an orator in the highest sense. He had no imagination and little
poetic feeling, nor did genuine passion ever inflame into fervor of
declamation his quiet, argumentative style. But he had humor; he spoke
simple, clear, strong English; he used no unnecessary words. He always
made his meaning plain and intelligible, and he had an admirable faculty
for illustrating every argument by something drawn from reading or from
observation or from experience. He was, in fact, the very perfection of
a common-sense talker, a man fit to deal with men by fair,
straightforward argument, to expose complicated sophistries, and to make
clear the most perplexed parts of an intricate question. He was exactly
the man for that time, for that question, and for the persuasive and
argumentative part of the great controversy which he had undertaken.

Cobden's chief companion in the struggle was John Bright, whose name has
been completely identified with that of Cobden in the repeal of the Corn
Laws. Bright was an orator of the highest order. He had all the
qualifications that make a master of eloquence. His presence was
commanding; his voice was singularly strong and clear, and had peculiar
tones and shades in it which gave indescribable meaning to passages of
anger, of pity, or of contempt. His manner was quiet, composed, serene.
He indulged in little or no gesticulation, he had a rich gift of genuine
Saxon humor. These two men, one belonging to the middle class of the
North, one sprung from the yeomanry of Southern England, had as a
colleague Charles Villiers, a man of high aristocratic family, of marked
ability, and of indomitable loyalty to any cause he undertook. Villiers
for some years represented the free-trade cause in Parliament, and
Bright and Cobden did its work on the platform. Cobden first, and Bright