The havoc which this unceasing desire of place made in Mr. Canning had always been observed by those who saw his public conduct. But when his adversaries railed against him as a perpetual and restless intriguer, the charge coming in the company of others known to be false against Mr. Pitt, was very naturally set down among the list of mere party inventions. The late publication of Lord Malmesbury's papers, however, must be admitted to give no small support to this view of Mr. Canning's character. Certainly, the account of his intrigues against Mr. Addington must lower him in the estimation of all men; and it rests upon evidence wholly above suspicion, Lord Malmesbury seeing in him nothing but what is good, and being his warm supporter; but indeed the proof is found under Mr. Canning's own hand. It would not be easy to find anything of a more paltry kind in all the history of political intrigue, than the attempt to drive Mr. Addington from office by a manifesto against him, only unsigned because Mr. Canning could get no one but a friend of his own to sign it; and designed, he says himself, to be presented with a "prescript" (as he terms it), stating that "the names were ready to be affixed," there being only two such names thus ready. Nothing can be more striking than the contrast which Mr. Pitt's conduct at this period offered to Mr. Canning's: it is dignified, frank, forbearing; kindly towards all, even those he had some right to complain of; not unkindly to Mr. Canning himself, though manifestly he disapproved of his proceedings, and was exceedingly impatient under his ceaseless importunity. Indeed he was compelled to give him more than one repulse; and he even appears to have declined seeing him at Walmer, that he might be spared his vexatious activity. Of course, no one concerned in the pitiful affair of the unsigned manifesto could venture upon disclosing it to such a man as Mr. Pitt.

It is truly to be lamented that Mr. Pitt should not have kept himself as much aloof from the warlike and anti-Gallican zeal of Mr. Canning, as he thus did from his thirst for office. The refusal to treat with Napoleon in 1800 must have proceeded from that influence against which he was not yet on his guard; for it was wholly at variance with all his former conduct.*

Of Mr. Canning it may be justly observed, as of Mr. Fox, that whatever errors he committed on other questions, on the Abolition of the Slave Trade he was undeviatingly true to sound principles and enlightened policy. Respecting the questions connected with Emancipation his course was by no means so commendable; and in resisting the motion on the Missionary's case, 1824, he acted culpably as well as feebly indeed; but of the Abolitionists he was at once a strenuous and effective ally. It is understood that he deeply lamented the contrast which Mr. Pitt's proceedings on this great question presented to his speeches; and he insisted on bringing forward a motion against the policy of capturing colonies to extend the Slave-traffic, when Mr. Pitt was in retire

ment.

* The portion of the Malmesbury Correspondence chiefly referred to is vol. iv. p. 103, 104; p. 119, 120, and p. 152. Lord Malmesbury carried the low intrigue about the paper a step farther; at least he described it more fully as intended, by concealing the poverty of the names subscribed, to operate as a threat and a deceptious threat. Mr. Fitt's uneasiness under Mr. Canning's restless impatience for office appears in a striking manner. He plainly alludes to him and his operations when he complains of the "zeal and the schemes of selfish people," and describes how he is disgusted and soured" as well as "beset by them."

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363

SIR SAMUEL ROMILLY.

How different from Mr. Pitt's conduct was that of Lord Grenville, who no sooner acceded to office in 1806, than he encouraged all the measures which first restrained, and then entirely abolished that infernal traffic! The crown lawyers of his administration were directed to bring in a bill for abolishing the foreign slave-trade of our colonies, as well as all importation into the conquered settlements-and when it is recollected that Sir Samuel Romilly at that time added lustre and gave elevation to the office of solicitorgeneral, it may well be supposed that those duties were duly and cheerfully followed both by him and by his honest, learned, and experienced colleague, Sir Arthur Pigott. It is fit that no occasion on which Sir Samuel Romilly is named should ever be passed over without an attempt to record the virtues and endowments of so great and so good a man, for the instruction of after ages.

Few persons have ever attained celebrity of name and exalted station, in any country, or in any age, with such unsullied purity of character, as this equally eminent and excellent person. His virtue was stern and inflexible, adjusted, indeed, rather to the rigorous standard of ancient morality than to the less ambitious and less elevated maxims of the modern code. But in this he very widely differed from the antique model upon which his character generally appeared to be framed, and also very far surpassed it, that there was nothing either affected or repulsive about him; and if ever a man existed who would more than any other

have scorned the pitiful fopperies which disfigured the worth of Cato, or have shrunk from the harsher virtue of Brutus, Romilly was that man. He was, in truth, a person of the most natural and simple manners, and one in whom the kindliest charities and warmest feelings of human nature were blended in the largest measure with that firmness of purpose and unrelaxed sincerity of principle, in almost all other men found to be little compatible with the attributes of a gentle nature and the feelings of a tender heart.

The observer who gazes upon his character is naturally struck first of all with its most prominent feature, and that is the rare excellence which we have now marked, so far above every gift of the understanding, and which throws the lustre of mere genius into the shade. But his capacity was of the highest order. An extraordinary reach of thought; great powers of attention and of close reasoning; a memory quick and retentive; a fancy eminently brilliant, but kept in perfect discipline by his judgment and his taste, which was nice, cultivated, and severe, without any of the squeamishness so fatal to vigour; these were the qualities which, under the guidance of the most persevering industry, and with the stimulus of a lofty ambition, rendered him unquestionably the first advocate, and the most profound lawyer, of the age he flourished in; placed him high among the ornaments of the Senate; and would, in all likelihood, have given him the foremost place among them all, had not the occupations of his laborious profession necessarily engrossed a disproportionate share of his attention, and made political pursuits fill a subordinate place in the scheme of his life. Jurisperi torum disertissimus, disertorum vero jurisperitissimus. As his practice, so his authority at the bar and with the bench was unexampled; and his success in Parliament was great and progressive. Some of his speeches, both forensic and Parliamentary, are nearly unrivalled in excellence. The reply, even as reported in 11 Vesey,

junior, in the cause of Hugonin v. Beasley,* where legal matters chiefly were in question, may give no mean idea of his extraordinary powers. The last speech that he pronounced in the House of Commons, upon a bill respecting the law of naturalization, which gave him occasion to paint the misconduct of the expiring Parliament in severe and even dark colours, was generally regarded as unexampled among the efforts of his eloquence; nor can they who recollect its effects ever cease to lament with tenfold bitterness of sorrow, the catastrophe which terminated his life and extinguished his glory, when they reflect that the vast accession to his influence from being chosen for Westminster, came at a time when his genius had reached its amplest display, and his authority in Parliament, unaided by station, had attained the highest eminence. The friend of public virtue, and the advocate of human improvement, will mourn still more sorrowfully over his urn than the admirers of genius, or those who are dazzled by political triumphs. For no one could know Romilly, and doubt that, as he only valued his own success and his own powers, in the belief that they might conduce to the good of mankind, so each augmentation of his authority, each step of his progress, must have been attended with some triumph in the cause of humanity and justice. True, he would at length, in the course of nature, have ceased to live; but then the bigot would have ceased to persecute the despot to vex-the desolate poor to suffer the slave to groan and tremble-the ignorant to commit crimes-and the ill-contrived law to engender criminality.

On these things all men are agreed; but if a more distinct account be desired of his eloquence, it must be said that it united all the more severe graces of

* A case very near resembling this, Macabe v. Hussey, was argued in the House of Lords in October, 1831, by Mr. O'Connell, and his argument was a masterpiece, according to the judgment of those who heard it.