almost in sight of his mother's birthplace. General Cobb married Marian, daughter of Chief Justice Joseph Henry Lumpkin, and Mrs. Henry Jackson, Mrs. A. L. Hull and Mrs. Hoke Smith are the surviving children of this union.

Besides Howell and Thomas R. R. Cobb the other children of John Addison Cobb were Major John B. Cobb, Laura, wife of Professor Williams Rutherford; Mildred, wife of Colonel Luther J. Glenn; Mary, who first married an Erwin and afterwards Dr. J. M. Johnson; and Martha, wife of Major John C. Whitner. Mrs. M. A. Lipscomb and Miss Mildred Rutherford, the brilliant Georgia educators and principals of the Lucy Cobb Institute, are granddaughters of Joseph Addison Cobb and nieces of General Howell and Thomas R. R. Cobb.

This hasty sketch is necessarily too brief to embrace all the achievements or to mention all the names which might be cited to illustrate the genius of this remarkable family, but the outlines furnished in the foregoing summary are sufficient to make it evident that among the very foremost of American households rightfully and properly belong the Cobbs, of Georgia.

[NOTE: During a sojourn in England in 1906 I found that in the county of Kent the Cobb name was still memorialized in one of the most picturesque of the old Tudor structures, known as Cobbham Hall. It has now belonged for several generations past to the Earls of Darnley, and was derived through the Stuarts, the pious King James having deeded it to the first of the Scottish line. The surrounding park contains seven square miles of beautiful English woods. Not far away is Gad's Hill, the famous country-seat of Charles Dickens; and the neighborhood is also savory with the recollections of Jack Falstaff, who performed some of his most celebrated exploits in the immediate environs. L. L. K.]

CHAPTER XXII.

Howell Cobb, Speaker of the National House, Governor and Cabinet Officer.

A

T an age when the average young American statesman is making his maiden speech on the hustings or taking his seat for the first time in the State Legislature, Howell Cobb, of Georgia, was at the helm of national affairs; and, though not the occupant of the executive chair, nor, at this early date, even among the holders of Cabinet portfolios, he was nevertheless counseling the authorities at Washington and shaping the policies of presidential administrations.

It is not divulging an executive secret to say that President James K. Polk leaned heavily upon the stalwart shoulders of the brilliant young Democratic Congressman from Georgia. Entering the arena of national legislation in 1842, when barely twenty-seven, Mr. Cobb had completed only one term of service when Mr. Polk was inaugurated, but he was nevertheless the most influential Southern Democrat in the lower house. Mr. Stephens, it is true, was making his powerful intellect felt upon national legislation, but Mr. Stephens was a Whig. Mr. Toombs who, in like manner, was scheduled to play an important part on the ante-bellum stage, had not yet en

tered Congress, being three years behind Mr. Cobb and Mr. Stephens; but Mr. Toombs was also a Whig. Both Mr. Toombs and Mr. Stephens afterwards became stout Democrats on the dissolution of the Whig party during the fifties, but Mr. Cobb was always an out-and-out Democrat of the old Andrew Jackson school.

Without the least desire to protrude his personality into the political foreground, Mr. Cobb from the start had displayed such a mastery of governmental principles and such a familiarity with public issues that he was recognized at once as a leader who needed no apprenticeship to give him premier rank. Nor does it diminish in any degree the significance of this commanding influence to say that Mr. Cobb was indebted for his grasp of the great fundamental ideas of political science less to his studious habits of research than to what may be called his strictly legal type of mind. He was cast in the mold of the great constitutional lawyer; and whether on the floor of Congress or in the courtroom he clearly evinced by his own independent methods of argument that he had reached his viewpoint mainly by the bridlepath of his own individual processes of thought rather than by the beaten highway of citations which other intellects had furnished.

Too much the man of action to pose as the bookworm or the antiquarian, Mr. Cobb, moreover, lacked the opportunities, even had he possessed the inclination, to loiter among the alcoves of established precedents. Exactly one year from the time of his admission to the bar he was made solicitor-general of the Western circuit; and soon after resigning this burdensome office three years later, he was elected to Congress. The position which he took almost immediately in the national councils, despite his