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GEORGE CANNING,

BY THE REV. W. TUCKWELL, M. A.

Rector of Stockton, near Rugby.

March 1st, 1882.

ON a certain day in the year 1787 delightful Fanny Burney, from her melancholy imprisonment at Windsor, records reading aloud to Queen Charlotte a Paper of the "Microcosm," "which," says critical Burney, "written by a set of of Eton Scholars, has great merit for such youthful composers." Unqualified merit we may be sure that it had not; had it been really clever the "sweet Queen" could not have understood it; it is in truth a false imitation of the Spectator, filled with the false glitter, the solemn truisms, the overloaded ornament, the delicious pomposity, which mark a clever schoolboy's theme; and it was the production of a little knot of Eton friends, Frere Smith, Mellish, Lord Henry Spencer, Canning. Of the various essays, Cannings are unquestionably the best; they contain, in germ, the character of his maturer style; the severe taste, apt quotation, quaint irony, subtle humour, buoyant genial vigorous straightforwardness, which gave in after years such flavour to his letters and to his despatches, and made him, in the judgment of a no less critic than Sir James Mackintosh, the first orator in the House of Commons. It is as a literary man, I conceive, that the present generation is disposed to rank him; his name recalls the Anti-jacobin and the Quarterly Review; the Knife-grinder and Matilda Pottingen, the Squibs on the Doctor' and Mr. Whitbread, the Musa Cateatonenses and the Parody on Norval's soliloquy, the Shooting Breeches and the New Whig

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Guide, the touching Epitaph on his son, and the ringing monody to "The Pilot that weathered the storm." In Sir Henry Bulwer's clever sketches of typical statesmen, Canning appears in the character of the "Brilliant Man":-" There goes the last of the Rhetoricians -was Jeffrey's utterance when the news of his death reached Edinburgh. In any other company I would gladly dwell on this fascinating and well-earned claim of his manysided reputation; but to a Society which I understand to be nothing if not historical I hope to vindicate his right to rank as foremost among the makers of History, and to shew that his literary accomplishments are but the Corinthian Capital to a pillar of priceless patriotic statesmanship. For, in fact, his name represents thirtyfive of the most important years of modern European history: the years of the great French war, the years of the violent political and commercial reaction which followed on its close. He was prominent at the moment when England, led by her aristocracy, stood alone amongst the nations in resistance to Napoleon: he was supreme when democracy, waking to self-consciousness, taught the lesson that dynasties existed for peoples, not peoples for dynasties. It was Canning who as Foreign Minister shattered the maritime schemes of the French Emperor by the seizure of the Danish fleet, and impaired the prestige of his armies by the despatch of Sir Arthur Wellesley to the Peninsula: the same great statesman baffled the selfish aims of the despots who would fain have succeeded to the tyrannies when the tyrant was laid low; discomfited the Holy Alliance, recognised the independence of the Spanish Colonies, freed Greece from the Turkish oppressor. It was Canning, lastly, who in the field of domestic politics discerned measures to be necessary from which both Whigs and Tories shrank; who made Catholic Emancipation inevitable, and would have carried it but for his death; who by his action in the commercial controversies following on the panic year, established principles which bore fruit later in the repeal of the Navigation Act, and the Corn laws. The period was a transition period, and Canning was a transition minister. The deaths of Pitt and Fox narrowed the

broad lines which had separated Whigs from Tories; and a Third Party grew up with Canning at its head, prepared at once to abandon obsolete doctrines and to resist revolutionary change. Under him Tories became liberalised, Whigs freed themselves from the aristocratic combinations which had neutralised their force; while the newborn Radical Reformers, happily for their country and themselves, were compelled to resign their hope of instant action, and thereby to gain self-discipline and education against the day when their force should beome irresistible.

Few eminent men have owed less than Canning to parental care and training. His father was a clever Irish scapegrace, who quarrelled with his family, ran into debt, renounced for a sum of money his legal rights as heir, squandered the money thus obtained, married a beautiful penniless Irish girl, and died soon after his son's birth. The mother struggled on, became a third-rate actress, married a man of bad character who died of drink, married a third husband who failed in business, was finally provided for by her son, who to the end of his life treated her with filial respect. His childhood was passed in the disreputable household of the second husband, till his condition was brought under the notice of his uncle, Stratford Canning, a prosperous London merchant, who sent him to a preparatory school at Winchester, and placed him afterwards at Eton. His school reputation is preserved for us by many of his famous comrades. They recall him as great in Greek and Latin verses, standing aloof from games, fond of acting, contesting the first place in the School debating Society with boys afterwards known as Lord Wellesley and Lord Grey, exhibiting unusual manliness of appearance and demeanour. In 1788, he went up to Christchurch, where new friendships were formed. The tone of the College under the strict but kindly rule of Cyril Jackson was unusually high, and the set of able young men among whom he found himself-Lords Holland, Granville, and Carlisle, Charles Ellis, Jenkinson, and Sturges Bourne, continued his firm friends through life. In 1790, he went to London to try his fortune at the bar. He was not long undiscovered and unsolicited

by the political jackals whose mission it was to secure young men of promise for their respective parties. His antecedents were Whig; he had spoken as a Whig in school and college debates; his uncle Stratford was a friend of Fox and Sheridan, and he had been wont to spend his holidays under the roof of Mrs. Crewe, the beautiful and witty toast of the Whig party. The Tories watched him with interest, but despaired of securing him; when at a dinner given by a great Whig Peer in order to bring him and Pitt together, it was discovered that they were well acquainted, information having reached Pitt which induced him to send for Canning, who had thereupon agreed to enter Parliament as his nominee, and to march under his banner. It was unquestionably a sudden change: more than one sensational story has been told to account for it, but it remains unexplained. He took his seat in 1793 for the Tory borough of Newport, to become the devoted supporter of Pitt's policy while he lived, and of his principles after he was dead. For a year he remained silent; his maiden speech was made in his second session; and in a letter to a friend he describes how he trembled when he rose; how the dead silence appalled him; how his own voice sounded to him like some other gentleman's; how warmed by collision with his opponents' arguments he ceased to care for anybody or anything, and having the House with him went on happily and triumphantly to the end. A second speech soon followed, and then four years of silence; for he had become Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and confined himself to the business of his office. It was a time at which men's minds were filled with one engrossing topic. The French Revolution had divided Englishmen into two camps, one filled with abhorrence for what were called "French Principles," the other maintaining that the great doctrine preached by the Revolutionists, the ultimate Sovereignty of the people, was a sound political truth. In the one was the brilliant minority led by Fox within the walls of Parliament, with the great mass of the nation out of doors; in the other were Pitt, the Tories, and the King. George III was a despot at heart, viewing all who differed from

himself as anarchists and rebels: Pitt was a Coriolanus in knee breeches and court sword, who looked at Parisian Jacobins and London Radicals as alike the scum of the earth, differing from one another only as a dirty Frenchman differs from a dirty Englishman. With his whole heart and soul, with the almost boyish enthusiam of a beginner as yet untamed by responsibility and unripened by experience, Canning adopted the views of his chief, and supported them by weapons such as none but himself could handle. In November, 1797, appeared the first number of the Anti-jacobin. It was in its original conception a mere political Review, intended to oppose and ridicule Revolutionary doctrines: the poetical department was the offspring of Canning's fancy, and his light artillery has preserved and popularised the Papers. Probably no one in the room has read-I do not counsel them to read the savage leading articles by Gifford, or the bitter paragraphs in each issue headed "Lies, Misrepresentations, Mistakes "; but few can be here who have not read and do not keep on their shelves, along with the Rolliad, the Political Eclogues, and the Rejected Addresses, the song and dialogue in the Rovers, the Loves of the Triangles, and the inscription on the cell of Mrs. Elizabeth Brownrigg, who "whipped three female prentices to death, and hid them in the coal hole."

It was the same burning subject that broke Canning's silence in Parliament. At the end of 1798, Mr. Tierney brought forward a notice recommending peace with France, and Canning replied in a speech which once for all made his reputation as an orator. Of all his speeches I would cite this as typical of his style, in its lucid arrangement, its polite scarifying of opponents, its gradual ascent from narrative and argument to sustained and impassioned declamation, the indignant sarcasm and terrible picturesqueness of the charges brought against the French, the sudden pleasantries relieving the strain on feeling and attention, the splendid quotations artistically woven in. Now the reader shudders at his recital of French atrocities, now laughs over his picture of a selfish peace, England turning round upon her own axis with her navy collected

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