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We learn little more of the personal or [dote is characteristic. The negotiation private history of Mr. Canning; and it had been dragged on from month to month, would be superfluous to trace his public by M. Falck, and seemed no nearer a close. career. He had not yet, nor for many a Canning's patience was fairly worn out, and day to come, relapsed into liberalism, while which was in some measure thrust upon him; but he continued the steady and able supporter of the Pitt government and Pitt policy, held some lucrative appointments, even when his chief was, for a time, laid aside; and, in 1799, married one of the wealthy co-heiresses of the too-famous General Scott.

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Sir Charles Bagot, our ambassador at the Hague, was one day attending at court, a despatch in cipher was hastily put into his hand. It was very short, and evidently very urgent; but unfortunately, Sir Charles, not expecting such a communication, had not the key of the cipher with him. An interval of intense anxiety followed, until he obtained the key; when to his infinite astonishment he deciphered the following despatch from the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs:

In matters of commerce, the fault of the Dutch
Is giving too little and asking too much;
So we'll clap on Dutch bottoms a twenty per
With equal advantage the French are content:

cent.

Twenty per cent,
Twenty per cent,
Nous frapperons Falck with twenty per cent.
GEORGE CANNING.

The minister kept his word. While this singular despatch was on its way to the Hague, an order in council was issued to put into effect the intention it announced.

Mr. Bell, who holds liberal opinions himself, makes as good a vindication as the case admits, of the creed which guided Canning for thirty years; or, rather, of his unaccountable tenacity to its vulnerable points.

In 1827, Mr. Canning made use of the following declaration:

Mr. Canning's political creed. It seems that These were the incomprehensible points of he took them up from the beginning as articles of faith, and could never consent to submit them to the test of reason.

Some rather poor verses are quoted as specimens of Canning's talent for this sort "There are two questions to which I wish of clever trifling. He was, too, it appears, to reply. I have been asked, what I intend to one of some five score gentlemen who do with the question of Parliamentary Reform severally have claims to originating The when it is brought forward. What do I inQuarterly Review; and was one of its tend to do with it? Why, oppose it, as I have most distinguished," though certainly not invariably done during the whole of my parone of its most voluminous contributors.liamentary career. What do I intend to do When Foreign Secretary, he would, we with the Test Act? Oppose it." are told, sit up till two and three in the morning, polishing the style of his despatches to Chateaubriand, from his sense of the literary eminence of the French minister! Whenever real business has to be transacted, Heaven defend a country from either a long-winded or classical and fastidious Foreign minister; or send him to the Wellington school, to learn how to write short and pithy despatches. Upon one occasion, when his patience was quite He must have seen it; but it might not worn out by the pettiness or paltry cunning suit him to confess as much. Upon these of Dutch diplomacy on a question regard- weak points of Canning's public character, ing a relaxation of the tariff, Canning had his biographer makes many excellent obrecourse to a favorite weapon. The anec-servations.

VOL. VIII. No. III.

58

He held that reform meant revolution. So did Mr. Pitt-when it suited his purposes. tion of the old system did not strike Canning It is surprising that the barefaced corrupas something inconsistent with the spirit and obligations of the Constitution.

After giving a luminous detail of the longexisting connexion between Portugal and England, and the obligations by which we were bound to assist our old ally, Mr. Canning It would be improceeded to state the case. possible to describe the effect produced by the following little sentence :

The manly part which Canning acted on | sarabands, never achieved so wonderful a the trial of Queen Caroline, and through- piece of sorcery as this speech of Mr. Canout the whole of that unhappy connexion, ning's achieved, over the passions, the judgment, the prejudices, and the stolid unbelief of which raised him in the esteem of generous the House of Commons. minds of all parties, is duly commemorated by Mr. Bell. Neither the King, nor yet his subservient tools, could ever forgive the contumacious minister; but Lord Castlereagh was no more, and Canning's services could no longer be dispensed with. There was no other man, of the Tory party, fit to fill office, in whom the nation placed so much confidence. He therefore became minister for foreign affairs, and got rid, for the time, of the odium and embarrassment produced by such domestic questions as Parliamentary Reform and the Test Act. His foreign policy commanded universal approbation. His recognition of the Spanish-American republics shook the Holy Alliance to its crazy foundation, and gave a finishing blow to despotic principles in Europe. We must here indulge in a quotation to which we are moved by various considerations, besides exhibiting Canning in the greatest moment of his public life.

In violation of an existing treaty, and urged onward by apostolical fury, Spain had made a perfidious attempt to overthrow the new constitution of Portugal. She dreaded the close neighborhood of free institutions; and, sustained by the sinister influence of France, she resolved to make a powerful effort to annihilate them. Intelligence of the imminent peril of our ancient ally reached ministers on the night of the 8th of December, 1826; on the 11th (Sunday intervening) a message from the King was communicated to Parliament; and on the 12th, a discussion ensued, which as long as a trace of English eloquence shall remain amongst the records of the world, will never be forgotten.

"The precise information, on which alone we could act, arrived only on Friday last. On Saturday the decision of the government was taken on Sunday we obtained the sanction of his Majesty-on Monday we came down to Parliament-and at this very hour, while I have now the honor of addressing this House-BRITISH TROOPS ARE ON THEIR WAY TO PORTUGAL."

The House fairly vibrated with emotion at this unexpected statement. It was the concentration in a single instant of the national enthusiasm of a whole age. At every sentence he was interrupted with huzzas! Then, when he spoke of the Portuguese constitution:—

"With respect to the character of that constitution, I do not think it right, at present, to offer any opinion; privately I have my own opinion. But, as an English minister, all I have to say is, may God prosper the attempt made by Portugal to obtain constitutional liberty, and may that nation be as fit to receive and cherish it, as, on other occasions, she is capable of discharging her duties amongst the nations of Europe." ..

Mr. Canning had now reached the pinnacle of his fame. His ambition had accomplished nearly its highest aims-his genius had overwhelmed all opposition. How little did England anticipate, at this proud moment, that she was so soon to lose her accomplished and patriotic statesman!

The brief remainder of Canning's life Mr. Canning was now at the height of his His foreign power, wielding an influence more extended was full of event and interest. and complete than any Foreign minister in policy had exalted him with all that was this country had ever enjoyed before. The enlightened and liberal in Britain or in Eusubject to which he addressed himself in this rope; and the struggle which followed the instance, was one that invoked the grandest retirement of Lord Liverpool, the invidious attributes of his genius, and derived a peculiar attempt made to baffle and crush him, enfelicity from being developed by a British minister; and, above all, by that minister who gaged the warmest sympathies of the had liberated the new world, and crushed the whole nation in his behalf. The meanness, tyrannies of the old. It was not surprising ignorance, and duplicity which at this time then, that, bringing to it all the vigor and en-marked the conduct of many of the Tory thusiasm of his intellect, and that vital beauty party, and in particular, The King's of style which was the pervading charm of his Friends," is as disgraceful as any thing to great orations, he should have transcended on be found in the history of Faction. But this occasion all his past efforts, and delivered a speech which not merely carried away the the parvenu, the man who had dared to admiration of his hearers, but literally inflam- hold independent opinions about questions ed them into frenzy. The fabulous spells of upon which "the Duke" and "the ChanOrpheus, who made the woods dance reels and cellor " entertained adverse prejudices,

happily triumphed, through his own inherent strength, backed as it was by public opinion all but universal; for the party opposed to Canning's appointment to the place of First Minister was not numerically greater nor much more weighty, when fairly placed in the scale, than that of those noble individuals now termed "Protectionists." It must have been a proud moment for Canning when, in spite of the formidable combination of peers and boroughmongers, in contempt of their protests and remonstrances, Mr. C. Wynn rose in the House of Commons and moved for a new writ of the borough for which Canning sat, he having accepted the office of First Commissioner of the Treasury." This was on the 12th of April, 1827; and on the 8th of August he expired, at the age of fifty-seven; his death accelerated, if not in a great measure caused, by the most unremitting and ungenerous party-hostility ever witnessed in England, acting upon a proud and singularly sensitive mind. Deserted in the most ignominious way by the leaders of what had been his own party, he sought and found able auxiliaries among the Whigs; and wanted but a longer term of life to have consolidated a strong and an improved government; though we do not pretend to say that, comparing Mr. Canning with the men who have succeeded him, the cause of rational freedom has by his death lost any thing.

der mental anxiety and physical sufferings.
They chose their moment well, and used it re-
morselessly.
Canning made instant response.
To all the assaults in the Commons, Mr.
Lords, his new Whig allies rendered full and
In the
ample justice to his character. There was
only one speech left unanswered-that of
Lord Grey.

This was a speech which does little honor to the memory of a Whig noted in his day, but yet a man who often betrayed narrow views and strong prejudices.

In the beginning of July, Parliament was prorogued. The fearful excitement was over; and the Premier, already undermined in health, sank into collapse. On the 20th of July, having accidentally taken cold and suffered from rheumatism, he removed to the Duke of Devonshire's villa for change of air. On the 30th he waited for the last time on the King at Windsor, who could not fail to perceive his condition; and after suffering the most severe pain, he died on the 8th of the following month, in the same chamber where Fox had breathed his last breath. He was buried at the foot of Mr. Pitt's tomb in Westminster Abbey; and whatever may be the permanent estimate which posterity will form of his public character and services, no English minister was ever more profoundly and generally lamented. His death was universally felt as a national calamity, In Cabinet cycles the same state of and mourned over as a private sorrow. things often curiously comes round again. We are certainly much indebted to Mr. But though without the same hearty support Bell for his able and compendious Life of from the opposition which Canning receiv- Canning, with which the world must be ed, Sir Robert Peel is in every way too pow-contented till, in the fulness of time, "The erful to be so easily assailed or shaken as the earlier victim.

Of Canning's last struggle it is said :

The tone of the opposition throughout the irregular and intemperate discussions which took place at different times on the ministerial changes, plainly betrayed the animus which lay at the bottom. Mr. Canning was literally baited in both Houses. The attacks which were made upon him are unparalleled in our parliamentary history for personality; their coarseness, malignity, and venom are all of a

Canning Papers" shall emerge into the broad light of The Row. His letters of forty years to his mother, who predeceased him only by a few months, and which were returned to the writer on her death, would of themselves form a most interesting collection.

From Fraser's Magazine.

ISH POETRY.

personal character. It was not against a sys- PAST AND PRESENT CONDITION OF BRITtem of policy they were directed-nor against special opinions or doctrines; but against Mr. Canning himself. His eminence, his popularity, his talents, made him the prey of envy and detraction; and this was the ground of hostility upon which he was hunted to the death, when official difficulties were thickening round him, and his health was giving way un

ume appeared in London with the plain and 'Tis sixty years since a thin quarto volunpretending title of An Ode to Superstition, and some other Pems, and exactly the same number of years since a thin oc

tavo appeared at Kilmarnock, entitled, verse was to usurp the place of poetry, dePoems, chiefly in the Scottish Dialect. sire for skill, and the ambition and impruThe thin quarto was the production of dence of daring for the flight and the rapSamuel Rogers, a young gentleman of ed- tures of the true-born poet. ucation, the son of a London banker; the thin octavo the production of Robert Burns, a Scottish ploughboy, without education, and almost without a penny in the world.

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While the poet of the Ode to Superstition is still among us, full of years and full of health, and as much in love with poetry as ever. "It is, I confess," says Cowley, "but seldom seen that the poet dies before the man; for when once we fall in love with that bewitching art, we do not use to court it as a mistress, but marry it as a wife, and take it for better or worse, as an inseparable companion of our whole life." It was so with Waller when he was eightytwo, and is so with Mr. Rogers now that he is eighty-one. Long may it be so :—

"If envious buckies view wi' sorrow

Thy lengthened days on this blest morrow,
May Desolation's long-teethed harrow,
Nine miles an hour,

Rake them, like Sodom and Gomorrah,
In brunstane stoure."

Waller was the delight of the House of Commons, and, even at eighty, he said the liveliest things of any among them." How true of Rogers, at eighty, at his own, or at any other table!

If such is the case, that Poetry is pretty well extinct among us-which no one, I believe, has the hardihood to gainsay-a retrospective review of what our great men accomplished in the long and important reign of King George III. (the era that has just gone by) will not be deemed devoid of interest at this time. The subject is a very varied one, is as yet without an historian, nor has hitherto received that attention in

critical detail so pre-eminently due to a period productive of so many poems of real and lasting merit,-poems as varied, I may add, as any era in our literature can exhibit, the celebrated Elizabethan period, perhaps, but barely excepted.

A new race of poets came in with King George III., for the poets of the preceding reigns who lived to witness the accession of the king either survived that event but a very few years, or were unwilling to risk their reputations in any new contest for distinction. Young was far advanced in years, and content-and wisely so-with the fame of his Satires aud his Night Thoughts; Gray had written his Elegy and his Odes, and was annotating Linnæus within the walls of a college; Shenstone found full occupation for the remainder of his life in laying out the Leasowes to suit the genius of the place; Johnson was put above necessity and the bookseliers by a pension from the crown; Akenside and Armstrong were pursuing their profession of physicians; Lyttleton was busy putting The poet of An Ode to Superstition has points and periods to his History; Smollett, outlived a whole generation of poets, poet- in seeking a precarious livelihood from asters, and poetitos; has seen the rise and prose; and Mallet employed in defending decline of schools, Lake, Cockney, and the administration of Lord Bute, and earnSatanic-the changeful caprices of tase-ing the wages of a pension from the ministhe injurious effects of a coterie of friends ter. Three alone adhered in any way to -the impartial verdicts of Time and a third generation-another Temple of Fame -a new class of occupants in many of the niches of the old-restorations, depositions, and removals, and what few are allowed to see, his own position in the Temple pretty well determined, not so high as to be wondered at, nor so low that he can escape from envy and even emulation. Nor is this all he has lived to see poetry at its last gasp among us; the godlike race of the last generation expiring or extinct, and no new-comers in their stead; just as if Nature chose to lie fallow for a time, and

verse Mason was employed in contemplating his English Garden; Glover, in brooding over his posthumous Athenaid; and Home, in writing new tragedies to eclipse, if possible, the early lustre of his Douglas.

There was room for a new race of poets. Nor was it long before a new set of candidates for distinction came forward to supply the places of the old. The voice of the Muse was first awakened in Edinburgh and Aberdeen. I can find no earlier publication of the year 1760 than a thin octavo of seventy pages, printed at Edinburgh, entitled, Fragments of Ancient Poetry, collect

ed in the Highlands of Scotland, and first. His name was heard in every circle translated from the Gaelic or Erse lan- of fashion, and in every coffee-house in guage, the first edition of a work which has town. Nor did he suffer his reputation to had its influence in the literature of our flag, but kept the public in one continual country, the far-famed Ossian, the favorite state of excitement for the remainder of his poem of the great Napoleon. "Have you life. He attacked the whole race of acseen," says Gray, "the Erse Fragments tors in his Rosciad; the Critical Reviewsince they were printed? I am more puz-ers (the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviewzled than ever about their antiquity, though ers of the day), in his Apology; the whole I still incline (against every body's opinion) Scottish nation, in his Prophecy of Famto believe them old." Many, like Gray, ine; Dr. Johnson, in The Ghost; and Howere alive to their beauties: inquiry was garth, in A Familiar Epistle. Every permade upon inquiry, and dissertation led to son of distinction expected that it was to dissertation. It was long, however, before be his turn next; and there was no saying the points in dispute were settled, and the where his satire would not have reached, for authorship brought home to the pen of the he was busy with a caustic dedication to translator. The Fragments have had a Warburton when, on the 4th of November, beneficial and a lasting effect upon English 1764, he died at Boulogne, at the too early literature. The grandeur of Ossian em- age of three-and-thirty. Dr. Young surboldened the wing of the youthful Byron, vived him nearly a year. What the preand the noble daring of the allusions and decessor of Pope in Satire thought of the illustrations countenanced the author of new satirist, no one has told us. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in what While the noisy Churchill" engrossed was new and hazardous, when Hayley held, to himself the whole attention of the puband Darwin was about to assume, a high lic, a poem appeared in May 1762, likely but temporary position in our poetry. to outlive the caustic effusions of the satThe Aberdeen volume of poems and irist, because, with equal talent, it is based trauslations (8vo. 1761) was the first pub- on less fleeting materials. This was The lication of Beattie, the author of The Shipwreck, a Poem, in Three Cantos, by a Minstrel. So lightly, we are told, did Sailor; better known as Falconer's ShipBeattie think of this collection that he used wreck, and deservedly remembered for its to destroy all the copies he could procure," simple tale," its beautiful transcripts of and would only suffer four of the pieces-reality, and as adding a congenial and peand those much altered-to stand in the culiarly British subject to the great body of same volume with the Minstrel. Beattie our island poetry. The popularity of acquired a very slender reputation by this Churchill kept it on the shelves of the first heir of his invention; nor would it booksellers for a time, but it soon rose into appear to have been known much beyond a reputation, and nothing can now occur the walls of the Marischal College, before to keep it down. the Minstrel drew attention to its pages, When Goldsmith published his first poem and excited curiosity to see what the suc- (The Traveller) in the December of 1764, cessful poet on this occasion had written Churchill had been dead a month, and unsuccessfully before. In the same year there was room for a new poet to supply in which Beattie appeared, a new candi- his place. Nor were critics wanting who date came forward to startle, astonish, and were able and willing to help it forward. annoy. The reputation of a poet of higher "Such is the poem," says Dr. Johnosn, who powers than Beattie seemed likely to ex-reviewed it in the Critical Review," on hibit would have sunk before the fame of which we now congratulate the public, as the new aspirant. I allude to Churchill, on a production to which, since the death whose first publication, The Rosciad, appeared in the March of 1761, and without the author's name. This was a lucky, and, what is more, a clever hit. The town, a little republic in itself, went mad about the poem; and when the author's name was prefixed to a second edition, the poet was welcomed by the public, as no new poet had ever been before. Nor was his second publication-his Apology-inferior to his

of Pope, it will not be easy to find any thing equal." This was high praise, not considered undeserved at the time, nor thought so now. Such, indeed, was the reputation of the Traveller, that it was likely to have led to a further succession of poets in the school of Pope, but for the timely interposition of a collection of poems which called our attention off from the study of a single school, and directed

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