and that, too, "through His great power," Mr. Bright would be the first to postulate.
Least of all our public men is the illustrious tribune of the people an adventurer, self-seeker, or demagogue. I do not know that he can be described as a "rich" man. "Riches" is a specially comparative term in this aristocracy-ridden land; but certainly the anti-corn law agitation found him a well-to-do man, "furnished with ability, living peaceably in his habitation" at Rochdale, where he might have remained to this day hardly distinguishable from the mass of his fellow-citizens, had he not had what, in the phraseology of Puritanism, is named a "call." He was at the mill, as Elisha was at the plough, when the divine messenger laid hold of him in the guise of a gaunt, starving multitude, for whose wrongs he was imperatively commanded to seek redress at the hands of a heartless and stupid legislature. The corn laws repealed, the horizon of his public duties widened; but the spirit in which he has continued to act has remained the same. He is the great Puritan statesman of England, ever consciously living, as did his favorite poet Milton, "in his great Taskmaster's eye." This is the key to his simple but grand character, as it is to that of the much more complex Gladstone,—a singular fact, certainly, in view of the grave doubts now entertained in so many not incompetent quarters with respect to the objective reality of all religious beliefs.
Mr. Bright has completed his sixty-eighth year, having been born in 1811, in his father's house at Greenbank, near Rochdale. Needless to say his ancestors did not "come over at the Conquest." So far as is known, there is not a single "de" among them. The
