life, especially, lapsing into digression and ill calculated for a very business-like audience like the House of Commons-these may be noted as the only drawbacks which kept him out of the very first place among the first speakers of his age, whom, in pathos, and also in graceful and easy and perfectly elegant diction, as well as harmonious periods, he unquestionably excelled. The influence which the Member for Yorkshire always commanded in the old Parliament-the great weight which the head, indeed the founder, of a powerful religious sect, possessed in the country-would have given extraordinary authority in the senate to one of far inferior personal endowments. But when these partly accidental circumstances were added to his powers, and when the whole were used and applied with the habits of industry which naturally belonged to one of his extreme temperance in every respect, it is difficult to imagine any one bringing a greater force to the aid of any cause which he might espouse.

Wherefore, when he stood forward as the leader of the Abolition, vowed implacable war against Slavery and the Slave Trade, and consecrated his life to the accomplishment of its destruction, there was every advantage conferred upon this great cause, and the rather that he held himself aloof from party connexion. A few personal friends, united with him by similarity of religious opinions, might be said to form a small party; and they generally acted in concert, especially in all matters relating to the Slave question. Of these, Henry Thornton was the most eminent in every respect. He was a man of strong understanding, great powers of reasoning and of investigation, an accurate and a curious observer, but who neither had cultivated oratory at all, nor had received a refined education, nor had extended his reading beyond the subjects connected with moral, political, and theological learning. The trade of a banker, which he followed, engrossed much of his time; and his exertions both in Parlia

ment and through the press, were chiefly confined to the celebrated controversy upon the currency, in which his well-known work led the way, and to a bill for restricting the Slave Trade to part of the African coast, which he introduced when the Abolitionists were wearied out with their repeated failures, and had wellnigh abandoned all hopes of carrying the great measure itself. That measure was fated to undergo much vexatious delay, nor is there any great question of justice and policy, the history of which is less creditable to the British Parliament, or, indeed, to some of the statesmen of this country, although upon it the fame of others mainly rests.

When Mr. Wilberforce, following in Mr. Clarkson's track, had, with matchless powers of eloquence, sustained by a body of the clearest evidence, unveiled all the horrors of a traffic which, had it been attended with neither fraud nor cruelty of any kind, was, confessedly, from beginning to end, not a commerce but a crime, he was defeated by large majorities, year after year. When, at length, for the first time, in 1804, he carried the Abolition Bill through the Commons, the Lords immediately threw it out; and the next year it was again lost in the Commons. All this happened while the opinion of the country was, with the single exception of persons having West India connexions, unanimous in favour of the measure. At different times there was the strongest and most general expression of public feeling upon the subject, and it was a question upon which no two men, endowed with reason, could possibly differ, because, admitting whatever could be alleged about the profits of the traffic, it was not denied that the gain proceeded from pillage and murder. Add to all this, that the enormous evil continued to disgrace the country and its legislature for twenty years, although the voice of every statesman of any eminence, Mr. Windham alone excepted, was strenuously lifted against it,—although, upon this only

question, Pitt, Fox, and Burke heartily agreed,—although the finest of all Mr. Pitt's speeches were those which he pronounced against it, and although every press and every pulpit in the island habitually cried it down. How are we, then, to account for the extreme tenacity of life which the hateful reptile showed ?— how to explain the fact that all those powerful hands fell paralyzed and could not bring it to death? If little honour redounds to the Parliament from this passage in our history, and if it is thus plainly shown that the unreformed House of Commons but ill represented the country, it must also be confessed that Mr. Pitt's conduct gains as little glory from the retrospect. How could he, who never suffered any of his coadjutors, much less his underlings in office, to thwart his will even in trivial matters-he who would have cleared any of the departments of half their occupants, had they presumed to have an opinion of their own upon a single item of any budget, or an article in the year's estimates-how could he, after shaking the walls of the Senate with the thunders of his majestic eloquence, exerted with a zeal which set at defiance all suspicions of his entire sincerity, quietly suffer, that the object, just before declared the dearest to his heart, should be ravished from him when within his sight, nay, within his reach, by the votes of the secretaries and under-secretaries, the puisne lords and the other fry of mere placemen,-the pawns of his board? It is a question often anxiously put by the friends of the Abolition, never satisfactorily answered by those of the Minister; and if any additional comment were wanting on the darkest passage of his life, it is supplied by the ease with which he cut off the Slave traffic of the conquered colonies, an importation of thirty thousand yearly, which he had so long suffered to exist, though an order in Council could any day have extinguished it. This he never thought of till 1805, and then, of course, the instant he chose, he

destroyed it for ever with a stroke of his pen. Again, when the Whigs were in power, they found the total abolition of the traffic so easy, that the measure, in pursuing which Mr. Pitt had for so many long years allowed himself to be baffled, was carried by them with only sixteen dissentient voices in a house of 250 members. There can then, unhappily, be but one answer to the question regarding Mr. Pitt's conduct on this great measure. He was, no doubt, quite sincere, but he was not so zealous as to risk anything, to sacrifice anything, or even to give himself any extraordinary trouble for the accomplishment of his purpose. The Court was decidedly against abolition; Geo. III. always regarded the question with abhorrence, as savouring of innovation,—and innovation in a part of his empire connected with his earliest and most rooted prejudices, the Colonies. The courtiers took, as is their wont, the colour of their sentiments from him. The Peers were of the same opinion. Mr. Pitt had not the enthusiasm for right and justice, to risk in their behalf losing the friendship of the mammon of unrighteousness; and he left to his rivals, when they became his successors, the glory of that triumph in the sacred cause of humanity, which should have illustrated his name, who in its defence had raised all the strains of his eloquence to their very highest pitch.

350

MR. CANNING.

WHEN Mr. Pitt, in 1784, stood against the united powers of the Coalition by the support of the court and the people, in debate he had only Mr. Dundas, and occasionally Mr. Wilberforce, to whom he could look for assistance while attacked by Fox, Burke, North, Sheridan, Erskine, Windham. But a younger race afterwards grew up and came to his assistance; and of these Mr. Canning was undoubtedly the first. He was in all respects one of the more remarkable persons who have lived in our times. Born with talents of a high order, these had been cultivated with an assiduity and success which placed him among the accomplished scholars of his day; and he was only inferior to others in the walks of science, from the accident of the studies which Oxford cherished in his time being pointed almost exclusively to classical pursuits. But he was anything rather than a mere scholar. In him were combined lively original fancy -a happily retentive and ready memory-singular powers of lucid statement-and occasionally wit in all its varieties, now biting and sarcastic to annoy, if not to overwhelm an antagonist-now pungent or giving point to an argument-now playful for mere amusement, and bringing relief to a tedious statement, or lending a charm to dry chains of close reasoningErant ea in Philippo quæ, qui sine comparatione illorum spectaret, satis magna dixerit; summa libertas in oratione, multæ facetiæ; satis creber in reprehendendis, solutus in explicandis sententiis; erat etiam imprimis, ut temporibus illis, Græcis doctrinis insti