[AUTHORITIES:-A good biography of Canning, with a complete and authentic collection of his jeux d'esprit and political satires, would seem to be still wanting. We have consulted the Life and Speeches, by Therry, published in 1828; the Political Life, by Mr. Augustus Stapleton, 1831; and the succinct Life of George Canning, by Robert Bell, 1846. We have also made use of The Spirit of the Public Journals (v. y.); Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, edit. by Edmonds, 1854; Lord Brougham, Statesmen of the Reign of George the 3rd; Adolphus, History of the Reign of George the 3rd; Miss Martineau, History of the Thirty Years' Peace; Sir G. Cornewall Lewis, Essays on the Administrations of Great Britain; Life of William Wilberforce, by his Sons; Memoirs of Francis Horner, edit. by Leonard Horner; Correspondence and Despatches of the 2nd Marquis of Londonderry; Diaries and Memoirs of Lord Malmesbury, Sir Samuel Komilly, and Sir James Mackintosh; Diaries of a Lady of Quality, edited by Hayward; Lord Holland, Memoirs of the Whig Party; Duke of Buckingham, Memoirs of the Court of George the 4th; Memoirs by Sir Robert Peel, edit. by Earl Stanhope and Lord Cardwell; The Annual Register; Lord Dalling, Historical Characters; The Greville Memoirs, edit. by Henry Reeve.]

MICHIGAN

BOOK II.

GEORGE CANNING.

A.D. 1770-1827.

I.

THE political history of Great Britain presents no more romantic or exciting chapter than that which records the career of George Canning. None of our leading statesmen have belonged so entirely to the middle class, and not even to an upper stratum of that class; none have so entirely made a profession of politics. Mr. Gladstone and Lord. Beaconsfield may also occur to our readers as having sprung from or as belonging to the middle class. But the former entered Parliament with the support of opulent connections; and the latter traces his descent from one of the most distinguished of Hebrew families. Canning was of reputable birth; and that is all. His father was a bankrupt wine-merchant; his mother, the portionless daughter of an Irish trader, was at one time compelled to earn her livelihood on the stage. His start in life was due to an uncle's liberality. In a country where rank and wealth carry more than their legitimate in.. fluence, Canning's social position was such as almost to preclude any hope of his attaining a foremost place. And that he should have risen to the premiership of

England, that he should have become the acknowledged leader of the House of Commons, that he should have planted his foot firmly on the threshold of the Upper Chamber, are circumstances sufficiently remarkable to awaken our interest and provoke our astonishment. Undoubtedly they are proofs of the possession of no common powers of mind and no ordinary force of character. At the outset of his career a calm observer would have been disposed to predict its certain failure. Everything was against him; except that he had already made some powerful friends. He was heavily weighted for the race he had set himself to run. No feature of his character, therefore, strikes us more than his persistency; that fixity of purpose which no obstacles could turn aside, and no discouragements weaken. By his political opponents he was frequently called "an adventurer;" and in his celebrated speech at Liverpool he accepted the designation, though not with the meaning attached to it by his enemies. He was an adventurer, he said, in being one of the people; in presenting himself before the public only with the claims of character, unaccredited by patrician patronage or party recommendation. "If," he said, "to depend directly upon the people, as their representative in Parliament; if, as a servant of the Crown, to lean on no other support than that of public confidence, if that be to be an adventurer, I plead guilty to the charge, and I would not exchange that situation, to whatever taunts it may expose me, for all the advantages which might be derived from an ancestry of an hundred generations." But in another sense, and a sense nearer to that implied

to power.

A LITERARY POLITICIAN.

ΙΟΙ

by the voice of faction, he was an adventurer. From the beginning of his career he aspired, not to place but He resolved that his intellectual endowments should yield him a splendid return. Like a politician of our own day, who in not a few points resembles him, he was determined that the world should hear him; and that his should be the highest position in the empire to which a subject could attain. It was no ignoble ambition, for he was fully conscious of the responsibilities which such a position involves, and his keen vision saw the capabilities of boundless well-doing which such a position confers. To some it would have seemed a hopeless ambition, when all the chances against them, all the bars of circumstance and accident, were calmly weighed. But every strong mind is aware of its strength, and Canning knew that he had the strength, as well as the patience and the energy which deal with the most formidable obstacles as the waves deal with straws.

Canning attracts attention, moreover, as the first literary politician who in England has "climbed to the top of the tree." Bolingbroke was a man of letters, but not so thoroughly literary as Canning; and Burke never held high office. Canning, steeped in literature to his lips, literary in his tastes, in his judgments, in his style, occupied an unique position, until a successor appeared in the author of 'Vivian Grey.' No man, not even Tom Moore or Theodore Hook, could throw off a pasquinade or a parody with greater ease and grace. He abounded in apposite illustration and felicitous quotation. He wrote prose and poetry with equal point and equal charm. His literary faculty was seen in his

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fastidious revision of his speeches, which he polished with as much of the "labor lima" as Horace bestowed on his cameo-like lyrics. His despatches are as carefully finished as his speeches; and it is characteristic of his good taste, as well as of his independence of conventionalities, that he was the first Minister who conducted his diplomatic correspondence in English. Like every refined mind, he was a passionate admirer of the Greek and Latin classics. Some of his best efforts are his humourous adaptations of the Odes of Horace. Few of his speeches but derive an additional grace from a felicitous Latin quotation. Wilberforce draws a pleasant picture of him and Pitt, amusing themselves in a corner of the latter's drawing-room, with some favourite Greek author, while the rest of the company were engaged in conversation. He read anything and everything, but had a special and honourable weakness for novels and poetry. Among the English poets his favourite seems to have been Dryden, whose vigorous verse he pronounced the perfection of harmony, and whom he recommended to Scott as a model, while fully appreciating all that was good and picturesque in "the Lady of the Lake" and her companions.

His literary tastes, as we have said, were carried into his oratory; that is, unlike Chatham's, and Pitt's, and Fox's, and even in a more marked degree than that of Burke's, it was the oratory of a man of letters. It sparkled with antithesis, with epigram, with allusion. Whole passages sounded like jests from Rabelais, except that they were more delicate; and these were elaborated with the skill of a practised hand. The fine Attic flavour and