only on Friday last; on Saturday the decision of the Government was made; on Sunday we obtained the sanction of his Majesty; on Monday we came down to Parliament; and at this very hour, while I have the honour of addressing you, British troops are on .their way to Portugal." More than one record has come down to us of the passionate feeling which vibrated through the House at these words, and at the now historical sentences which followed them. "The Balance of Power," he said, defending his acquiesence in the invasion of Spain by France a few years before, the Balance of Power was not to be adjudged now as it had been half-a-century ago: new weights had been added to one or the other scale; new Powers had appeared and were appearing to vary and shift the standard, and with these a far seeing statesman had to reckon;' This he had done;-"I sought materials of compensation in another hemisphere; contemplating Spain such as our ancestors had known it, I resolved that if France had Spain, it should not be Spain with the Indies: I called the new world into existence to redeem the balance of the old." "It was an episode "to have heard him.

in a man's life," says the Diary of an M. P., It was as if everyone in the House had been electrified. Canning seemed actually to increase in stature his attitude was majestic; his breast heaved and expanded, his nostrils dilated, and a noble pride curled his lip. It reminded one of, and came up to, what I have read of the effects of Athenian eloquence."

Grand and electric no doubt; yet none the less perhaps, mistaken. The Chatham-like personal assumption,-I sought, I resolved, I called-was not forgotten or forgiven by the colleagues whom he had over-ruled in Council and now eclipsed in debate; by the rising Peel, the veteran Wellington, the superannuated Eldon. And this he was soon to learn. In the following March, Lord Liverpool died; to the public mind Canning seemed his rightful successor; the king thought so too and sent for him. The Tory aristocracy took the alarm: Lord Eldon hobbled hither and thither in terrified remonstrance: The Duke of Newcastle waited on the king to say that himself and eight more great Boroughowning Peers would oppose the Government if he, Canning, were

Prime Minister.

The King completed the appointment, and within twenty-four hours seven of his colleagues, the Duke of Wellington, Lords Eldon, Bathurst, Melville, Bexley, Westmoreland, and Mr. Peel, resigned their offices and refused to join him on any terms. And the hostility was not negative but active : for months to come Mr. Canning was literally baited in both Houses, with personal attacks, coarse, venomous, malignant. The leading Whigs gallantly joined his side, and he knew well how to fight his own battles: only one attack remained unanswered, an elaborate and violent philippic in the House of Lords by Lord Grey, in whose family a talent for deserting their friends at a political crisis would appear to be hereditary. It was contrary to etiquette to reply to it in the House of Commons, but it rankled in Canning's heart. Outwardly all went well. His Cabinet was the strongest since the days of Pitt; his majority in the House was assured; but anxiety, annoyance, overwork, were sapping his bodily strength his last political act was the treaty by which England, France, and Russia bound themselves to protect the unhappy Christians of Greece from the tyranny of Turkish power. He had caught cold at the funeral of the Duke of York early in the year; by sitting out of doors when heated he brought on rheumatic fever; he moved to the Duke of Devonshire's Villa at Chiswick, for rest and change; became rapidly worse; and died on the 8th of August, 1827, in the very room where Fox had died eleven years before.

Caret vate sacro! The great Englishmen who have found fit biographers may be counted on the fingers of one hand, and Canning is not amongst them. Not even the public side of his life, his statesmanship, foreign policy, home influence, have been so disentangled and brought out, as to make him to the general student a clear historical personage. Macaulay missed him; Green hardly touches him he lived too late for the Parliamentary gossip of Wraxall, too soon for the pungent journalising of Greville. His life is written on scattered leaves, in the cumbrous pages of Stapleton, in the Metternich letters, in the Malmesbury Diary, in the Wellington Despatches, in the fugitive Papers of Reviews.

Sibylline though they be, these are extant; the wind has not scattered them; it needs only sympathy and labour to disinter and sort and combine them. But the other side of him, the private personal side, is lost, the men who worked under him and looked up to him as a master; the men who sate at his table and knew him in his softer hour; who shared his anxieties and witnessed his emotion; have passed away like himself: the records of domestic tenderness and of social brilliancy, the daily habits, the traits of voice and manner, the acts of kindness, the strains on temper, the explosions of spleen, the virtues and the foibles, which together make up the man, these the wind has scattered hopelessly; these the Sacer Vates cannot reproduce; he can at best give us a figure whose dead lineaments are coloured by his own genins, as Scott drew Claverhouse, and Carlyle drew Cromwell.

The loss to the Humanist is complete; the loss to the historian can be repaired. Great will be our gratitude to him who shall depict for us with graphic pen the last great Statesman of the Unreformed Parliament: the political descendant of Pitt, and Chatham, and Halifax, and Marvell, and Pym and Sadleir. There will be recounted of him not alone the wit that pointed his reasoning, the scholarship which informed his eloquence, the exuberant gleefulness of nature which sent him rejoicing as a giant into every enterprise and every debate: but it will be told besides, that with all his sarcastic keenness and all his native impetuosity he never violated or permitted others to violate the laws of innate and habitual taste and breeding; that, above all things an Englishman, he yet made his patriotism consistent with and provocative of championship for the oppressed throughout the world; that, aristocratic by temperament and experience, he abhorred and baffled tyranny; that, living in a time when the obstinate opponents of healthy movement and the rash instigators of hasty change were meeting face to face and threatening a civil war of interests and classes, he saw the middle course, guided into it the nobler spirits from either side; stood between the living and the dead, and stayed the double plague.

FIRST NOTES OF A

STUDY OF THE REIGN OF CHARLES II.

BY OSMUND AIRY, ESQ., M. A.,

January 24th, 1882.

A man who looks back upon his past life seldom dwells upon the times of low motive or of disgrace: rather, if such have occurred to him, he rests upon the memory of days when ideals were high, and when strife, if not successful, was at least noble.

And, as we act towards that Past which is ours and none others', so we act towards the Past which is the common inheritance of us all. A Nation has its memories too, to be cherished or to be concealed and the race which feels its blood go quicker and the fibres of its being strengthened when it remembers that of its stock and of its rearing were Becket and Wycliffe, Shakespear and Drake, Eliot and Milton, Chatham and Nelson, may well be forgiven if it is in no haste to call to mind times which carry with them the indelible marks of shame.

There is enough in the history of England for self laudation. But a man who would do his duty now will seek for warnings in past failures and the English nation, if the study of its history is to be anything better than an amusement, will read as carefully and as reverently the story of the great failure, as it seems to most, which we call the reign of Charles II., as that of the great success which we call the reign of Elizabeth.

I admit at once that at first sight the period which I have chosen has little to allure and very much to repel. Great principles are at work; but to see the working of them requires that we should

often move in an atmosphere heavy with profligacy and dishonour. It means that with the help of private diaries and letters which were never meant to see the light we must track Charles through his niddering life from lie to lie; that we must fling open the folding doors of the gin-palace and the house of ill-fame which were called the court, and watch the tipsy revels of the cheats and bullies and shameless hussies who were the boon companions of the king. I do not propose, however, to dwell upon this aspect of the reign; because, so far as I can see, the English people are not fairly to be charged with the blaguardism of the Sedleys and Castlemaines and other hangers-on of a Bohemian court; their innate morality fought hard against it; it shocked, but it never pervaded the country; it was a national disgrace, but not a national crime: moreover, the sarcasms of Marvel, the half-shocked, half-admiring respectability of Pepys, the pain of Evelyn, are open to all; and open to all too are the dull and dreary torrents of filth that spread their beastliness over the greater part of the literature of the age. I have only time to quote a few words from the pure and solemn agony which possessed the soul of Algernon Sydney:-"When that country of mine, which used to be esteemed a paradise, is now like to be made a stage of injury; the liberty which we hope to establish oppressed; all manner of profaneness, looseness, luxury and lewdness set up in its height,-the best of our nation made a prey to the worst; the parliament, court and army corrupted; the people enslaved; all things vendiblewhat joy can I have in my own country?-Better is life among strangers than in my own country upon such conditions! Miserable nation! that from so great a height of glory is fallen into the most despicable condition in the world, of having all its good depending upon the breath and will of the vilest persons in it! Cheated and sold by them they trusted! Infamous traffick; equal almost in guilt to that of Judas."

"Blush, oh Heavens!" says an anonymous writer a few years later, "and be astonished, oh earth, a people loved of God, and so often saved by His wonderful providence, are become the Tyre