THE APPENDIX.

No. I. GEORGE CANNING AND THE GREVILLE

MEMOIRS.'

No. II. PROFESSOR AYTOUN'S BROADSHEET

ON THE DISRUPTION.

THE APPENDIX.

No. I.

GEORGE CANNING AND THE GREVILLE MEMOIRS.'

"THE Duke of Wellington talked of Canning a great deal the other day at my mother's. He said his talents were astonishing, his compositions admirable, that he possessed the art of saying exactly what was necessary, and passing over those topics on which it was not advisable to touch, his fertility and resources inexhaustible. He thought him the finest speaker he had ever heard "-(August 10, 1827). "If Canning had had a fair field he would have done great things, for his lofty and ambitious genius took an immense sweep, and the vigour of his intellect, his penetration and sagacity, enabled him to form mighty plans and work them out with success. Notwithstanding his failings, he was the greatest man we have had for a long time, and if life had been spared to him, and opposition had not been too much for him, he would have raised our character abroad, and perhaps found remedies for our difficulties at home"(January 22, 1830). "If Canning were now alive we might hope to steer through these difficulties; but if he had lived we should probably never have been in them. He

was the only statesman who had sagacity to enter into and comprehend the spirit of the times, and to put himself at the head of that movement which was no longer to be arrested"— (August 31, 1830). "God only knows how it will all end. There has been but one man for many years past able to arrest this torrent, and that was Canning; and him the Tories-idiots that they were, and never discovering that he was their best friend-hunted to death with their besotted and ignorant hostility "-(August 11, 1831). "Just before he was going to India, Holland called on him, and Canning dined at Holland House. On one of these occasions they had a conversation on the subject of Reform, when Canning said he saw it was inevitable, and he was not sorry to be away while the measure was accomplished; but that if he had been here while it was mooted, he could have let those gentlemen (the Whig aristocracy) know that they should gain nothing by it"-(September 19, 1834). THE GREVILLE MEMOIRS.

1874.

IN a paper on Canning written many years ago, I expressed the opinion that his political genius and capacity were of a first-rate order-almost, if not quite unique in our parliamentary history- an opinion which was pronounced at the time (when it was the fashion to ridicule Tory statesmanship, past and present,—a fashion now passing away), by more than one influential critic to be extravagantly eulogistic. The recently published journals of Mr Greville-some extracts from which are prefixed to this note-confirm, I think, the impression of Mr Canning's superiority to most of his contemporaries which I had intended to convey. may be said that, as a general rule, the Tory party since its complete reconciliation to the monarchy under Chatham has been distinctively the party of rest. I am firmly persuaded that the men who most vividly realise

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Party Progress.

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that many centuries of substantially good government in any nation is a really surprising phenomenon (seeing how slight and insecure the partition is which at any moment divides order from anarchy), are the men who are calculated to do the state best service. But the natural tendency of these men, especially when organised into a political party, is to become simply obstructive, clinging tenaciously to institutions after the life has gone out of them, and when they have become incompatible with the existing manners and ideas. To the party of rest any kind of change is always keenly annoying, and sometimes intolerably hateful. Once or twice within the era of our parliamentary history they have clung to the Old until it has been roughly and violently snatched from their grasp. The Reform Bill of 1832 was a practical revolution, because the Tories, without any competent leaders, were at the moment utterly unreasonable; and it was Mr Peel, more than Lord John Russell, who made a sweeping reform inevitable. No society, however solidly constructed, can afford to be periodically in convulsions; and the defenders of things as they are require to be convinced ever and again, that a position which has become untenable must be frankly and good-humouredly abandoned. This was the moral which Bolingbroke vainly and more than once tried to impress upon the Jacobite squires of his own day, a moral which has been successively enforced by Pitt, and Canning, and Peel, and Derby, and Disraeli. Only to men of supreme courage, of first-rate capacity, and of a certain imaginative nobility and loftiness of temperament, can the work of conversion be intrusted; and it is every day becoming clearer, that if Canning had been spared, the whole course of recent English political history might have been altered. The prolonged exclusion of the Tory party from office is now quite clearly

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