Cambridge, he proceeded to M.A. in 1713, and again changed to Oxford for his B.D. and D.D. degrees, the last being taken in 1723. His earliest works were: 'A Letter from a Minister to his Parishioners,' London, 1718, 8vo, and ' A Poem on the Death of . . . Addison,' London, 1720, 8vo. Bishop Gibson, to whom he was chaplain, gave him the prebend of Erpingham in Lincoln Cathedral in 1721, the prebend of Buckden in 1726, resigned 1727; a prebend in St. Paul's, the united rectories of St. Austin and St. Faith, with that of Acton, Middlesex, in 1730; the chaplaincy to George II, 1730; and the archdeaconry of London, in which he succeeded Dr. Tyrwhitt, in 1742. He published nine sermons separately. One, delivered at St. James's before George II in 1748, led eventually to the resignation of his chaplaincy. He published it in self-defence in 1749, under the title ' A Persuasive to Chastity.' It had been censured, and the preacher had been lampooned in a court ballad. Dr. Whiston calls it ' that seasonable and excellent sermon ' delivered ' when crime between the sexes was at its greatest height.' In 1748 he published a volume entitled 'Poems on several Occasions,' London, 8vo, printed for the widow of a clergyman, formerly his curate. In this work he eulogises Stephen Duck's poetic fame, glorifies somebody's squirrel and a lady's canary, and laments over a dead cow. He fell from his horse in 1749, and seriously impaired his memory. In 1751 he was elected president of Sion College, and in 1752 resigned his warrant for chaplain. He says all his preferments together did not amount to 350l. a year clear. Soon after he met with losses of 2,000l. In 1753 appeared 'Concio ad Clerum,' and in 1755 'An Essay tending to promote Religion,' London, 8vo, a curious piece, half prose, half verse, clearly showing his disappointment at not having a canonry of St. Paul's to add to the archdeaconry. He speaks of his chaplaincy, and affirms that the sum total of reward received for his twenty-two years' service was one meal a fortnight and no salary. In 1756 he published 'A Poem sacred to the Memory of Queen Anne for her Bounty to the Clergy,' London, 4to. In 1757 he published a collection called 'Twenty-eight Discourses on various Subjects and Occasions,' London, 4to, and the next year, when residing at Acton, he republished the whole of his works, under the title of 'Discourses and Essays in Prose and Verse by Edward Cobden, D.D., arch-deacon of London, and lately chaplain,' &c. Cobden died on 22 April 1764. His wife, a daughter of the Rev. Mr. Jessop of Tempsford, Bedfordshire, died in 1762.
[The author's works; Nichols's Lit. Anecdotes, i. 555, ii. 207, 288, 412, iii. 67, iv. 317; Nichols's Miscellaneous Poems, vii. 366; Memoir of Whiston; Cole's MS. Athenæ in Brit. Mus. Add. IMS. 5865.]
COBDEN, RICHARD (1804–1865), statesman, was born on 3 June 1804, in an old farmhouse in the hamlet of Heyshott, near Midhurst, on the western border of Sussex. He came of an ancient stock of yeomen of the soil, for several centuries rooted in that district. William Cobden, his father, was a small farmer. The unfavourable circumstances of agriculture at the peace were too strong for him, and the farm was sold. Relatives took charge of his eleven children, and Richard, who was fourth among them, was banished for five miserable years to one of those Yorkshire schools whose brutalities were afterwards exposed in Dickens's famous picture of 'Dotheboys Hall.' In 1819 he became a clerk in his uncle's warehouse in Old Change, and in due time went the circuits as commercial traveller, soliciting orders for muslins and calicoes, collecting accounts, diligently observing whatever came under his eye, and impressing everybody with his power of making himself useful.
In 1828 Cobden determined to set up in business on his own account. He and a couple of friends raised a thousand pounds among them, most of it by way of loan; they persuaded a great firm of calico-printers in Lancashire to trust them with the sale of their goods on commission in London; and they quickly established a thriving concern. In 1831 the partners leased an old factory at Salden, a village between Blackburn and Clitheroe in Lancashire, and began to print their own calicoes. Cobden himself took up his residence at Manchester (1832), the great centre with which so much of his public activity was afterwards identified. The new venture prospered, Cobden prints won a reputation in the trade for attractive pattern and good impression, and the partners appeared to be destined to accumulate a large and rapid fortune. Cobden felt himself free to give some of his time to wider concerns. He was const itutionally endowed with an alert and restless intelligence, and in the hardest days of his youth he had done what he could to educate himself. He taught himself French, practised composition in the shape of two or three very juvenile comedies, took an ardent interest in phrenology, and was profoundly and permanently impressed by George Combe's views on education. He read some of the great writers, and picked up a fair idea of the course of European history. His practical and lively temperament combined with his
