vernment without the help of the Revolution | Wells really has done something towards families, and at another declaring from his clearing the reputation of Lord Loughboplace in the House of Lords that he defied rough. It was believed by many, up to the an insolent oligarchy. Statesmen who went publication of his recent volumes, that a to take counsel with him complained that he paper found among the Rosslyn MSS., being could not reason consecutively for five mi-a written opinion on the Catholic claims nutes together, but occupied the whole time with vague and stilted declamation. Shall we be thought to offer an unpardonable insult to the memory of the great Lord Chatham, if we venture to suggest that he might possibly have had nothing to say? The fact is, he pined for his old ascendancy when the circumstances which maintained it had departed. In a period of profound peace he sighed for the authority of dictator. He could not give his mind to the ordinary details of business or the ordinary management of parties. He had never acquired the kind of knowledge which these duties demand; and when his advice was sought by men of one-tenth his genius, but of superior capacity for administration, he was naturally perplexed and angry, and took refuge in either total seclusion or else in those meaningless harangues of which his visitors complained. We say that this view of Lord Chatham's character is dinily shadowed out in some of the memoirs we have mentioned; but it supplements, it does not contradict, the common estimate of his powers, and is therefore no exception to the general rule. We must say the same of the Diary and Correspondence of Lord Auckland. The Bishop of Bath and Wells has not effected any substantial change in our estimate of his father's character derived from the testimony of his contemporaries. The Bishop observes that Lord Auckland cannot, as supposed by Lord Malmesbury, have joined with Lord Loughborough in prepossessing the Royal mind against Mr. Pitt's measure of Catholic Relief, because on the 31st January, 1801, he wrote a letter in which he implied that he had but just learnt Mr. Pitt's resolution, and prayed him to reconsider it. But it seems to us that no argument can be founded upon this letter. It is quite possible that Lord Auckland may have acted as alleged without desiring Mr. Pitt's downfall; and the letter in question is by no means to be read without Mr. Pitt's answer, which has been published by the Bishop himself, and which is conclusive, if not as to Lord Auckland's conduct, at least as to the view which Mr. Pitt took of it. Indeed, Lord Auckland's silence under so cutting a reproof is noticed by Mr. Rose in his Diary as showing that he was conscious of having deserved it. But the Bishop of Bath and The Bishop states that the editor of Rose, who has read the unpublished correspondence between 13 VOL. CXII. delivered to the King in 1795, was the work of Lord Loughborough. The writer of it asserts that any further relaxation of the laws against Romanists would be a violation of the Coronation Oath. The existence of this paper was never revealed to Mr. Pitt. Lord Loughborough himself affected, in the presence of his colleagues, no disinclination to see a Relief Bill brought forward. We do not wonder, therefore, at the tone in which Lord Stanhope speaks of this document, which was first brought to light by Lord Campbell. The Bishop, however, adduces several good reasons for believing that the paper in question was the work not of Lord Loughborough, but of Lord Clare, whose letters to Mr. Beresford contain the same arguments in very similar language. It is something, no doubt, to have dispelled this one shadow from the name of Lord Loughborough; but we cannot go so far as to say that the opinion of him handed down by his contemporaries has been greatly modified by the discovery. And before quitting the subject, we must remind the Bishop that he has committed, in pleading for Lord Loughborough, exactly the same mistake as he has done in the case of Lord Auckland. He tells us that Rose's Diary contains a complete explanation of Lord Loughborough's conduct. But this explanation is merely recorded by Rose as the statement of Lord Loughborough himself. There are points, no doubt, on which public opinion has been modified by the contents of these various publications; but, as we have already said, they rather serve to fill in details than affect the broad outlines of character. It is necessary to state this fact very plainly, because the world is apt to anticipate much more from the posthumous papers of eminent men than they are generally able to afford. Information of this nature oozes out by degrees, and our opinions of men become pretty well moulded into the shape which they are destined to preserve before the men themselves are dead. No doubt the estimate of certain great ministers has latterly undergone a change, but this is owing, in one or two instances only, to the contents of political memoirs. Rose and Lord Auckland, considers that it is not true that Lords Loughborough and Auckland pro duced the breach between the King and Mr. Pitt. But of what weight is that writer's opinion on any subject? and where is the correspondence? The public estimate of Lord Castlereagh has risen considerably, since the publication of his despatches. The common opinion of Pitt's private character, founded on the libels and caricatures of which a man so eminent must always be the subject, has been greatly modified by the Memoirs of Lady Hester Stanhope, by Lord Wellesley, by Wilberforce, and, finally, by his latest biographer, Lord Stanhope. Wraxall's portraiture of Pitt has been quite blotted out by these authorities. According to Sir Nathaniel, Pitt cared for nothing but politics, and buried himself at Walmer Castle in 1801, gnawing his heart with vexation at his loss of power, indifferent to all country pleasures, and intent on nothing but how soonest to get back to Downing Street. What is the truth? Pitt was of a most joyous disposition, delighting in literary recreations, and passionately fond of hunting, shooting, and farming. He took a farm near Walmer, to which he and Lady Hester used often to resort for luncheon; and his niece was fond of relating in after years what hunches of bread-and-cheese and bread-and-butter she had seen him devour on these occasions. His own letters are full of rural topics they contain frequent allusions to his partridge-shooting, and show plainly that he took as much interest in manoeuvring his corps of Volunteers and inspecting his Cinque Ports harbours. Yet our estimate of the man from a public point of view has undergone but little change, although we see more and more clearly from each successive publication the unequalled loftiness of his character. The character of Canning has been affected in both its public and its private aspect by the tenor of our recent memoirs; and perhaps, on the whole, injuriously. All the memoirs which have proceeded from an ultra-Tory point of view, all which have proceeded from a purely Whig point of view, and even the Buckingham Memoirs— which ought to have done justice to one who braved the jealousy of mediocrities out of pure admiration for Lord Grenville-are veined with ill-concealed dislike of him. Strange to say, even Lady Hester Stanhope is violent in abuse of her uncle's protégé and champion. Almost the only publications which are favourable to him in detail are the Wellesley Correspondence and Lord Stanhope's Life of Mr. Pitt:' though, by the way, it is the biographer of Lord Eldon who has drawn what is, in our opinion, the finest portrait of him extant.t With these two exceptions, the general tone is against him. He took a comparatively independent line after Mr. Pitt's death, and he was not strong enough in property or connexions to support an independent line. He claimed to be the legitimate inheritor of Pitt's policy, and a certain class of great personages grew tired of the name of Mr. Pitt. He made many personal enemies by his unbridled sarcasm, and early in his career he alienated the most powerful section of his own party by abuse of Mr. Addington. When Pitt died, Canning found himself in much the same position as that of Mrs. Rawdon Crawley in the Marquis of Steyne's drawing-room, when she had to face the ladies by herself; and, though he struggled with his difficulties gallantly to the end of his days, he never thoroughly overcame them. All this we see clearly enough in these memoirs; but unfortunately for Canning it has been the interest of no one in particular to set the world right on these points; and the result is, that he is one of the very few great statesmen of the last hundred years whose reputation is lower at the present day than at the hour of his death. Canning, then, is a fair exception to our rule: the publication of Political Memoirs has affected his memory-that is to say, it has brought to light and hung out before the public gaze a thousand petty passions of which Mr. Canning was the object; while, as he left behind him neither Diary nor Biography of his own, the task of defending him, even where heartily undertaken, has proved more than usually difficult. This is not the place for entering upon an elaborate examination of his character. Some future passages of our article will involve a partial vindication of it. It is sufficient for the present to point out that the concurrence of testimony against him is far more distinctly traceable to personal grounds than the imputations on the Duke of Bedford or Lord Auckland. The traditional unwritten estimate of Mr. Fox is affected by these 'Political Memoirs in only one point. It has been customary to associate with his name that kind of magnanimous generosity for which men of dissipated and profuse habits too easily acquire the reputation. The old story of his lying on the rug buried in Herodotus, just after he had been ruined at the gaming-table, has had a great effect upon the public. It is, we must confess, a very telling situation; but (as we have had occasion to observe in previous articles) his own letters show him to have been neither so generous nor so magnanimous as it has been the fashion to suppose him. Our readers may remember that in 1804, on Mr. Addington's resignation, an attempt was made to reunite the old Tory party, with Pitt and Lord Grenville in their | ton received overtures from Mr. Fox for joinold places. Grenville in the mean time had ing him, but put them aside;* yet in his corformed a close alliance with Mr. Fox, and respondence of March, 1804, Fox speaks of refused to take office unless the latter was the pleasure it will give him 'to hunt down admitted to the Cabinet. This George III. this vile fellow.'t was equally resolved that he should not be; and then it was that Fox is reported to have declared that he would be no obstacle to an arrangement; that he was too old to care for office himself; and 'that he hoped his friends would join Mr. Pitt, and that Mr. Pitt would find places for them.' This has always been spoken of as very generous and noble-minded conduct. As such, it served Lord Grenville with an excellent pretext for declining the overtures of Pitt. He must stand by so generous a friend, even though that friend set him free. But Mr. Fox's self-denying declarations, as his adherents well knew, were not to be taken au pied de la lettre. About year later he made a very similar profession in the House of Commons : We have now noticed the chief instances in which these disclosures have caused any modification of our judgment on the character of public men. On the whole they are not important; and, with the exceptions which we have noticed, we do not find our previous conceptions of public characters fundamentally affected. Taken simply, however, as illustrations and confirmations of generally acknowledged estimates, the traits of character and private purposes in which these volumes abound are highly interesting. Perhaps the most curious instance we can give is the spectacle which they present of the immoability of the Grenville character, even to the third generation. In 1765 and again in 1766 Lord Temple would not join Lord Chatham because he was aiming at the re'I feel myself sure,' he said,*that an admi-establishment of the Grenville Ministry. nistration formed to comprehend all that is respectable for rank, talents, character, and influence in the country affords the only chance of safety; and I trust that nobody can suppose that any individual (however he may disapprove, as I certainly do, the unconstitutional principle of exclusion) would suffer any personal ambition, if ambition he had, to stand in the way of the formation of such a ministry.' : This sounds very magnanimous but we find him, three days afterwards, addressing to Mr. O'Brien, a partisan writer, the following explanation: 'I never meant to admit (nor do the words at all convey such a meaning) that such a ministry could be made without my having a principal, or perhaps the principal share in it, or that it could be formed at all without Pitt's coming down from his situation at the Treasury, and in fact, considering the present ministry as annihilated, in which case all such persons as I alluded to might be consulted on the formation of a new one.'t This from the man who, a year before, was too old to care for office! It is, indeed, abundantly clear from his correspondence that he never dreamed of entering the Cabinet except on terms of official equality with Pitt, and with a First Lord of the Treasury of his own nomination. Another little fact also, recorded by Lord Colchester, upon the authority of Addington, clearly proves, if true, that Fox was really anxious for place. In June, 1803, and February, 1804, Adding From 1801 to 1804 his nephew, Lord Gren- The characters of individual statesmen are so closely interwoven with the transactions in which they have taken part, that whatever elucidates the one may be expected to throw light upon the other. Accordingly, in the foregoing pages, in which we have been con * Col., vol. i. p. 529. Fox Correspondence,' vol. iv. p. 31. fining ourselves ostensibly to character, we have anticipated much which belongs properly to events; and, conversely, in the examination of events we shall often find ourselves gliding into the discussion of characters. There are some transactions, however, which admit of being considered, if not without reference to the character of the actors, yet without these forming the prominent object of attention. Such, for instance, is the disagreement between Fox and Lord Shelburne under the second administration of Lord Rockingham. Fox was Foreign Secretary; Shelburne, Home and Colonial Secretary; and it is usually stated that Fox took umbrage at Shelburne for sending agents of his own to Paris during the negotiation of the peace with America without first consulting him. Shelburne, as Colonial Secretary, conceived himself to be interested in a negotiation with the revolted colonies, which had in fact commenced with a letter to himself from Dr. Franklin; while Fox, on the other hand, was treating not directly with the colonies, but with the French Foreign Office, on their behalf; and, as we may learn from his Correspondence, he endeavoured to exclude Shelburne, no less than Shelburne, according to his own view, endeavoured to hoodwink him. The distribution of business between the two Offices would almost inevitably lead to misunderstanding, unless there existed entire confidence between the ministers who held them; and after all it is only probable that Shelburne entertained the same distrust of Fox as Foreign Minister as was entertained by Lord Grenville many years afterwards for we are informed in the Courts and Cabinets of George III.,'t that during his brief administration in 1806, in which Fox was Foreign Secretary, it was considered doubtful whether he reaped any advantages from his co-operation, beyond his popularity. So again in 1793, when the union with the Whigs was on the tapis, Mr. Pitt has incurred censure for not at once giving Fox the Foreign Office. But his real reason for not doing so is preserved in the Malmesbury Correspondence, though Lord Russell has thought fit to overlook it. 'It would appear to our allies,' he said, as if a change of foreign policy were in contemplation.' So it most assuredly would have done. Yet this simple and sensible explanation has been recorded by no one but Lord Malmesbury. In the same memoirs we find a statement which, coupled with the story we have alluded to regarding Lords Auckland and Loughborough, explains the resignation of Mr. Pitt in 1801 more clearly than any other theory. He is reported to have told Canning that it was not the King's mere opposition to the Roman Catholic Bill which caused his resignation, but the manner in which it was concerted; clearly implying by his words that it was the secret influence of unacknowledged advisers against which he was protesting, and not a mere opinion of the King's. This story is so thoroughly consistent with rumours which are audible more or less distinctly in half the memoirs of the period, to say nothing of the direct shape in which they are clothed by Lord Malmesbury, that its truth is scarcely to be doubted. But what a cloud of misconceptions is removed by these few words, and what a light they shed upon the conduct of the King, George III., who, first driven to act in this manner at his accession to the throne, now recurred to it in a difficulty where really it was wholly superfluous. Similarly we understand Lord Grenville's refusal to act without Fox in 1804 quite plainly as soon as we are reminded that he was only carrying out the regular tactics of his family. What his uncle had done in 1766, and his nephew was to do in 1827, that he too was doing in 1804. Lord Grenville,' says Malmesbury, thinks the Marquis of Buckingham would make as good a Prime Minister as anybody.' The estrangement of the Whigs from the Prince Regent after 1811 is another of our political mysteries which has been variously interpreted according to the connexions of the interpreter. We sometimes wonder that a brief remark attributed to Sheridan, which is to be found in so common a book as Moore's Life of Sheridan,' has not been more frequently quoted. The quarrel, as our readers will remember, was on the subject of the Regency. The Prince of Wales wanted the Whig precedent of 1788 to be followed exactly. But Lord Grenville, who was now among the Whigs, had at that time figured among the Tories, and vigorously supported the original propositions of Mr. Pitt. Whig doctrine,' says Sheridan, speaking of 1811, was sacrificed to preserve the consistency of Lord Grenville--that was the first fruits of the Coalition of 1806.' We see at once how natural it was that veteran Whigs who remembered the battle of 1788 should see the thing in this light, and that the Prince himself should feel aggrieved at the old doctrine being abandoned in deference to a converted Tory. The After the death of Mr. Fox no name is so prominent in English politics for many years as that of Canning. He was, to judge from these memoirs, the source of more embarrassments than any other statesman in our annals. For nearly a quarter of a century, inaccurate, have been at once contradicted, we cannot for a moment think possible. Here especially, then, is seen the need of a careful and conscientious editor. We doubt how far it is conducive to the cause of truth to publish these statements to the world without a syllable of comment or explanation. We cannot, however, complain of any want of impartiality in the editor of this Diary; for reflections of the Duke of Buckingham himself, which positively invite misconstruction, have been left as they were, written down without any of those qualifying remarks which should in fairness have been applied to them. The memoranda of Sir Robert Peel contain a curious intimation that the days are gone by when a political leader could influence his party by consultation. Formerly,' said he, a minister had nothing to do but to ascertain the disposition of a few leading personages, and if they went with him his success was certain. But if I had attempted to take the Conservative party into my confidence concerning the repeal of the corn laws, it would have ensured the defeat of that measure.' If Sir Robert Peel was right, then this passage becomes at once the locus classicus on the subject, as showing at what point the change introduced by the Reform Bill first took effect practically. Whether he was right or wrong is another question; but if he was right, the repeal of the corn laws is a landmark not only in our economical but also in our constitutional history. whenever we see a difficulty in the Cabinet, | answer involves a slur upon the character of we are almost sure to be informed that Wellington, which, after his own express Canning is at the bottom of it. We have public statement, which would certainly, if already adverted to the manner in which the reputation of this statesman has been affected by the publication of the political memoirs of rivals or of enemies. But there are two transactions of his life in which they have done him good service, namely, his quarrel with Lord Castlereagh and the formation of his own ministry. Of the former it is sufficient to say that what Castlereagh complained of appears to have been really the fault of the Duke of Portland and Lord Camden, and not of Canning. But with regard to the latter, the recently published Diary of the first Duke of Buckingham contains a most curious statement.* Before leaving England on a Continental tour, the Duke of Buckingham, full of personal hopes and aspirations, sought an interview with George IV. This was in the month of July, 1827, and His Majesty then gave him a full account of all that had taken place in the preceding April, when it became necessary to find a successor to Lord Liverpool. It would be foreign to our present purpose to investigate the subject at any length. But our readers may remember that the Duke of Wellington positively denied in the House of Lords that the King had ever asked him to be Premier. George IV. assured the Duke of Buckingham that he had pressed this post upon the Duke. But what is, if possible, still more strange, is that the King distinctly admitted that he himself had nominated Canning; that he had been driven to this step by the behaviour of Peel and Wellington, which resembled only the dog We have said that the looseness with in the manger; that it was they who had which party connexions were regarded in forced Canning upon him, and not Canning former days no less than in the present, is himself. It is true that the Duke of Buck- one of the points brought home to us by a ingham, with characteristic caution, reposes study of these memoirs. Party, in fact, is so no implicit faith in his sovereign's veracity. artificial an institution, that the flood of selfBut it is difficult to understand what motive interest is always straining its barriers. the King could have had for deceiving him; experience of the last hundred years seems and it is difficult also to understand why he to teach us that rigidity in maintaining polishould have preferred Mr. Canning, unless tical connexions is the exception rather than he had suffered provocation. In Welling the rule. A strong minister makes converts ton's correspondence with Canning on this often by his own moral weight; oftener by subject, we can detect traces of distrust; and the tedium of opposition. The existence of a he may possibly have betrayed some irritation weak ministry commonly denotes that Parin the King's presence. But that is compa-liament is divided into three parties, of which ratively beside the mark. Did the King we may be pretty sure that two will make offer him the Treasury? and did the beha- attempts to act together. The vigorous goviour of himself and Mr. Peel drive the King into Canning's arms? According to the Buckingham Diary we must answer both these questions in the affirmative. Yet this *Private Diary of Richard Duke of Buckingham and Chandos' (1862), vol. i. cap. i. The vernment of Pitt drew numerous young men from his opponents. The feeble government of Addington showed that half the Whig leaders were ready on terms to join the Tories. Fox offered to go over; Sheridan and Erskine all but went; Tierney went. Others, judging less truly that a Whig resto |