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With the single exception of "The Friend of Humanity and the Knife-Grinder," no piece in the collection is more freshly remembered than the “ Inscription for the Cell of Mrs. Brownrigg," who

"Whipp'd two female 'prentices to death,
And hid them in the coal-hole."

The "Answer to the Author of the Epistle to the Editors of the Anti-Jacobin" is less known, and it derives a fresh interest from the fact, recently made public, that the epistle (which appeared in the Morning Chronicle of Jan. 17, 1798) was the composition of William Lord Melbourne. The beginning shows that the veil of incognito had been already penetrated.

"Whoe'er ye are, all hail !—whether the skill

Of youthful Canning guides the ranc'rous quill,
With powers mechanic far above his age,
Adapts the paragraph and fills the page,
Measures the column, mends whate'er's amiss,
Rejects that letter, and accepts of this;

Or Hammond, leaving his official toil,

O'er this great work consume the midnight oil—
Bills, passports, letters, for the Muses quit,

And change dull business for amusing wit."

After referring to "the poetic sage, who sung of Gallia in

a headlong rage," the epistle proceeds :

"I swear by all the youths that Malmesbury chose, By Ellis' sapient prominence of nose,

By Morpeth's gait, important, proud, and big—

By Leveson-Gower's crop-imitating wig,

That could the powers which in these members shine,
Could that warm spirit animate my line,

Your glorious deeds which I humbly rehearse,

Your deeds should live immortal in my verse;

And while they wonder'd whence I caught my flame,

Your sons should blush to read their father's shame."

"New Morality" is commonly regarded as the masterpiece of the Anti-Jacobin; and, with the exception of a few lines, the whole of it is by Canning.

It appeared in the last number, and he is said to have concentrated all his energies for a parting blow. The reader who comes fresh from Dryden or Pope, or even Churchill, will be

VOL. I.

4

disappointed on finding far less variety of images, sparkling antitheses, or condensed brilliancy of expression. The author exhibits abundant humour and eloquence, but comparatively little wit, if there be any truth in Sydney Smith's doctrine "that the feeling of wit is occasioned by those relations of ideas which excite surprise, and surprise alone." We are commonly prepared for what is coming, and our admiration is. excited either by the justness of the observations, the elevavation of the thoughts, and the vigour of the style, than by a startling succession of flashes of fancy. If, as we believe, the same might be said of Juvenal, and the best of his English imitators, Johnson, we leave ample scope for praise; and "New Morality" contains passages which have been preserved to our time, and bid fair to reach posterity, by their poetry and truth. How often are the lines on Candour quoted in entire ignorance or forgetfulness of their author :

"Much may be said on both sides.'-Hark! I hear
A well-known voice that murmurs in my ear-
The voice of Candour. Hail! most solemn sage,
Thou drivelling virtue of this moral age,
Candour, which softens party's headlong rage.
Candour--which spares its foes; nor e'er descends
With bigot zeal to combat for its friends.
Candour-which loves in see-saw strain to tell
Of acting foolishly, but meaning well ;
Too nice to praise by wholesale, or to blame,
Convinced that all men's motives are the same;
And finds, with keen discriminating sight,
Black's not so black, nor white so very white.

"Fox, to be sure, was vehement and wrong:
But then, Pitt's words, you'll own, were rather strong.
Both must be blamed, both pardon'd; 'twas just so
With Fox and Pitt full forty years ago!
So Walpole, Pulteney ;-factions in all times
Have had their follies, ministers their crimes.'
"Give me th' avow'd, th' erect, the manly foe,
Bold I can meet-perhaps may turn his blow;
But of all plagues, good Heav'n, thy wrath can send,
Save, save, oh! save me from the Candid Friend!

The dangerous tendency of the doctrine is immediately afterwards shown by its application :-

"I love the bold uncompromising mind,
Whose principles are fix'd, whose views defined:

Who owns, when Traitors feel th' avenging rod,
Just retribution, and the hand of God;

Who hears the groans through Olmutz' roofs that ring,
Of him who mock'd, misled, betray'd his king-
Hears unappall'd, though Faction's zealots preach,
Unmoved, unsoftened by Fitzpatrick's speech."

So, to show defiance of canting candour, we are required to hear unmoved the groans of a pure-minded and well-inten-. tioned, however mistaken, patriot in a foreign prison.

Canning's reputed share in the Rovers excited the unreasoning indignation, and provoked the exaggerated censure, of a man who has obtained a world-wide reputation by his historical researches, most especially by his alleged skill in separating the true from the fabulous, and in filling up chasms from the national annals by a process near to that by which Cuvier inferred the entire form and structure of an extinct species from a bone. The following passage is taken from Niebühr's History of the Period of the Revolution (published from his Lectures, in two volumes, in 1845):

"Canning was at that time (1807) at the head of foreign affairs in England. History will not form the same judgment of him as that formed by contemporaries. He had great talents, but was not a great statesman; he was one of those persons who distinguish themselves as the squires of political heroes. He was highly accomplished in the two classical languages, but without being a learned scholar. He was especially conversant with Greek writers. He had likewise poetical talent, but only for satire. At first he had joined the leaders of opposition against Pitt's ministry; Lord Grey, who perceived his ambition, advised him, half in joke, to join the ministers, as he would make his fortune. He did So, and was employed to write articles for the newspapers, and satirical verses, which were often directed against his former benefactors. Through the influence of the ministers he came into Parliament. So long as the great eloquence of former times lasted, and the great men were alive, his talent was admired; but other persons had no great pleasure in his petulant epigrammatic eloquence and his jokes, which were often in bad taste. He joined the Society of the Anti-Jacobins, which defended everything connected with existing institutions. This society published a journal, in which the most honoured names of foreign countries were attacked in the most scandalous manner. German literature was at that time little known in England, and it was associated there with the ideas of Jacobinism and revolution. Canning then published in the Anti-Jacobin the most shameful pasquinade which was

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ever written against Germany, under the title of 'Matilda Pottengen.' Göttingen is described in it as the sink of all infamy; professors and students as a gang of miscreants: licentiousness, incest, and atheism as the character of the German people. Such was Canning's beginning; he was, at all events, useful; a sort of political Cossack." (Geschichte des Zeitalters der Revolution, vol. ii., p. 242.)

In the Rovers, or Double Arrangement, written to ridicule the German drama, the parody is now principally remembered by Rogero's song, of which, Mr. Edmonds states, the first five stanzas were by Mr. Canning. "Having been accidentally seen, previous to its publication, by Mr. Pitt, he was so amused with it that he took a pen and composed the last stanza on the spot."

Amongst the prose contributions to the Anti-Jacobin, there is one in which, independently of direct evidence, the peculiar humour of Canning is discernible,-the pretended report of the meeting of the Friends of Freedom at the Crown and Anchor Tavern. The plan was evidently suggested by Tickell's Anticipation, in which the debate on the address at the opening of the session was reported beforehand with such surprising foresight that some of the speakers, who were thus forestalled, declined to deliver their meditated orations.

At the meeting of the Friends of Freedom, Erskine, whose habitual egotism could hardly be caricatured, is made to perorate as follows:

"Mr. Erskine concluded by recapitulating, in a strain of agonizing and impressive eloquence, the several more prominent heads of his speech-He had been a soldier and a sailor, and had a son at Winchester School-he had been called by special retainers, during the summer, into many different and distant parts of the country -travelling chiefly in post-chaises-he felt himself called upon to declare that his poor faculties were at the service of his country -of the free and enlightened part of it at least-he stood here as a man-he stood in the eye, indeed in the hand, of God-to whom (in the presence of the company and waiters), he solemnly appealed-he was of noble, perhaps, royal blood--he had a house at Hampstead-was convinced of the necessity of a thorough and radical reform-his pamphlet had gone through thirty editions, skipping alternately the odd and even numbers-he loved the Constitution, to which he would cling and grapple-and he was clothed with the infirmities of man's nature-he would apply to the present French rulers (particularly Barras and Reubel) the words of the poet :

"Be to their faults a little blind;
Be to their virtues very kind,
Let all their ways be unconfined,

And clap the padlock on their mind!'

And for these reasons, thanking the gentlemen who had done him the honour to drink his health, he should propose, 'Merlin, the late Minister of Justice, and Trial by Jury!"

The wit and fun of these imitations are undeniable; and their injustice is equally so. Erskine, with all his egotism, was, and remains, the greatest of English advocates. He stemmed and turned the tide which threatened to sweep away the most valued of our free institutions in 1794; and (we say with Lord Brougham) "before such a precious service as this, well may the lustre of statesmen and orators grow pale."

At a long subsequent period (1807) Canning, when attacked in Parliament for his share in the Anti-Jacobin, declared that he "felt no shame for its character or principles, nor any other sorrow for the share he had had in it, than that which the imperfection of his pieces was calculated to inspire." Still, it is one of the inevitable inconveniences of a connection with the press, that the best-known writers should be made answerable for the errors of their associates; and the licence of the Anti-Jacobin gave serious and well-founded offence to many who shared its opinions and wished well to its professed object. In Wilberforce's Diary for May 18, 1799, we find "Pitt, Canning, and Pepper Arden came in late to dinner. I attacked Canning on indecency of Anti-Jacobin." Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria, complains bitterly of the calumnious accounts given by the Anti-Jacobin of his early life, and asks with reason, "Is it surprising that many good men remained longer than perhaps they otherwise would have done, adverse to a party which encouraged and openly rewarded the authors of such atrocious calumnies?"

Mr. Edmonds says that Pitt got frightened, and that the publication was discontinued at the suggestion of the Prime Minister.

During the Addington administration Canning's muse was more than ordinarily fertile, as had recently been remarked in commenting on the part taken by Mr. Pitt and his friends. Besides the celebrated song of The Pilot that weathered the Storm, composed for the first meeting of the Pitt Club, he poured forth squib after squib against "the Doctor," inter

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