these are great works, Sir H. Bulwer | have acted a great part in life, and remained a admits that they one and all give indications character in history. As it is, he has left in of the highest crder of capacity. many of the best men of England, and of the Continent, the deepest admiration of his talents, his wisdom, his knowledge, and his benevolence." We have subjected Sir H. Bulwer's theo The attainment of a Sir H. Bulwer supports his theory by an anecdote. "What have you done," he (Mackintosh) relates that a French lady once said to him, "that people should think you so superior?" "I was obliged," he adds, “as usual to refer to my projects." If Mad-ry or conception of Mackintosh to so close ame de Staël, who thought him the first an analysis, because it is calculated to proman in England, had been at his elbow, she mischievous: the tendency to depreciate mote two popular tendencies which we think would have given a very different answer to her country woman. Credit for intellectual ent from what they are, or for not possessmen for not being something wide ly differsuperiority can no more be obtained and ing incompatible qualities; and the tendenmaintained by projects, than credit for wealth can be acquired by announcing an coveted object, whether place, wealth, or cy to deify success. intention to build a mansion like Dorches- position, is enough; and he who wins the ter House, and fill it with the choicest pro- race by mere jockeyship is praised and ductions of art. Inquiry would be instantly courted, to the utter neglect of him who has directed to the means; and, as regards been distanced by being overweighted with Mackintosh, the most satisfactory references honour, generosity, principle, and truth: would have been forthcoming. Unlike Addison, who said that he could draw for a thousand pounds though he had not a guinea in his pocket, the man of promise had always both pockets full as well as a large balance at his bankers. "Till subdued by age and illness, his conversation was more brilliant and instructive than that of any human being I ever had the good fortune to be acquainted with." Such is the deliberate opinion of Sydney Smith, who spoke his mind more freely and conscientiously than any human being we ever had the good fortune to be acquainted with. Mackintosh lacked creative genius, and he was constitutionally subject to fits of lassitude. This is why he produced no great work. He was essentially a speculative man; he wanted self-assertion, and from his extreme placability could be set aside and passed over with impunity. This is why he was so often reduced to say, with Gibbon, "My vote was counted in the hour of battle, but I was overlooked in the division of the spoil." Here, again, let Sydney Smith speak: "If he had been arrogant and grasping; if he had been faithless and false; if he had been always eager to strangle infant genius in its cradle, always ready to betray and blacken those with whom he sat at meat, he would have passed many men, who, in the course of his long life, have passed him; but, without selling his soul for pottage, if he only had had a little more prudence for the promotion of his interests, and more of angry passions for the punishment of those detractors, who envied his fame, and presumed upon his sweetness: if he had been more aware of his powers, and of that space which nature intended him to occupy: he would "One self-approving hour whole years out- Of stupid starers, and of loud huzzas; "Cobbett" will probably be voted the most entertaining of the English subjects. It is fresher and stranger, and it is handled with more than ordinary vigour and vivacity. Nowhere is Sir H. Bulwer's language so attractive by its freedom and its flow, as in tracing a career which, at almost every turn, taste, feeling and judgment compel him to censure or condemn. His contentious man is in no sense a typical or representative man. Cobbet stands alone. None but himself can be his parallel. He is a species, a genus, in himself. Nature never made another like him, and we do not want another; for there never was one to whom the vernacular term blackguard was more frequently or more appropriately applied. When the Speaker asked him to a parliamentary dinner, he refused, saying that "he was not accustomed to the society of gentlefarther; he was men." He might have gone not accustomed to, he would not have been tolerated in, any respectable society out of his own family. His vanity was inordinate, his temper uncontrolled; his violence at the semblance of a contradiction, or the suspicion of a slight, became ferocity; and he vented his rage in scurrilous abuse amounting to downright ruffianism. Here is a speci men: "There's a fine Congressman for you! If any d-d rascally rotten borough in the universe ever made such a choice as this (a Mr. Blair Mac Clenachan), you'll be bound to cut my throat, | have we in exchange for these?' Go to the and suffer the sans culottes sovereigns of Phila-site of some once opulent convent. Look at delphia the hob-snob snigger-suee-ers of Germanstown -to kick me about in my blood till my corpse is as ugly and disgusting as their living carcasses are.' " the cloister, now become, in the hands of some rack-renter, the receptacle for dung, fodder, and fagot-wood. See the hall, where for ages the widow, the orphan, the aged, and the stranger found a table ready spread. See a bit of its This was published in America. But some walls now helping to make a cattle-shed, the of his choicest flowers of rhetoric were rerest having been hauled away to build a workserved for his native soil, and he was no house. Recognise on the side of a barn a part respecter of places or persons. He thus of the once magnificent chapel; and, if chained to the spot by your melancholy musings, you apostrophised Malthus : I call you by the be admonished of the approach of night by the only name which expresses the full infamy voice of the screech-owl issuing from those of your character when I say, Parson." Ir-arches which once, at the same hour, resounded ritated by a call to order in the House of with the vespers of the monk, and which have Commons, he turned round, and addressed for seven hundred years been assailed by storms to the member from whom the call proceed- and tempests in vain ; if thus admonished of the ed the most revolting phrase in the vocabu- necessity of seeking food, shelter, and a bed, lary of slang. Nor is it any mitigation to lift up your eyes and look at the whitewashed say that some of his epithets tickled the vul- and dry-rotten shed on the hill called the "Gengar humour and stuck; as when he de- tleman's House," and apprised of the "board nounced The Bloody Old Times," or called signs of his hospitality, turn your head, jog " and " wages spring guns," which are the the Quakers (whom he had elsewhere eulo- away from the scene of former comfort and gised)"unbaptized, buttonless blackguards." grandeur; with old-English welcoming in your His supreme delight was to run counter to mind, reach the nearest inn, and there, in a a popular feeling, as in his "Good Queen room half-warmed and half-lighted, with the Mary" and "Bloody Queen Bess." reception precisely proportioned to the presumed length of your purse, sit down and listen to an account of the hypocritical pretences, the base motives, the tyrannical and bloody means under have been witnessing was effected, and the hos which, from which, and by which the ruin you pitality you have lost was for ever banished from the land." 66 His sketches of rural scenery are often graceful, always fresh and true. But his strength lay in coarse withering invective or abuse; and in this line he is, fortunately, of Pennsylvania" were unlucky in provokunapproachable. If the "drab-coloured men ing the comic indignation of Sidney Smith, they were not less so in encountering the scurrility of Cobbett: It would be well if his transgressions against propriety had been confined to language. But he deliberately set at nought honesty, gratitude, principle, honour, consistency, and truth. He would take up any cause that suited or party that courted him, and systematically blacken any cause or party that did not. He would borrow money, exalt the lender (Sir F. Burdett, for example) to the skies, never dream of repay ing it, and libel him the moment he refused to lend more. The American Republic was, by turns, the only land worth living in, and the land" where judges become felons, and felons judges." He held up Tom Paine to general execration as "an infamous and atrocious miscreant," and then tried to make "It is fair, also, to observe that this State capital of his bones. Yet this Ishmael of (Pennsylvania) labours under disadvantages in the political world, this Thersites of jour-one respect that no other State does. Here is nalism, was an excellent husband, an exemplary father, a genuine patriot at heart; he had fancy and feeling, with a keen sense of moral and natural beauty; he had indomitable energy and strong good sense; he was larg ly endowed with civil courage; and taking into account his inimitable style, he cannot be pronounced deficient in a certain quality of taste. His defence of monastic institutions is worthy of the learned and eloquent author of " Monks of the West: " "Go into any county, and survey, even at this day, the ruins of its perhaps twenty abbeys and priories, and then ask yourself, What LIVING AGE. VOL. VII. 250. in precisely that climate which suits the vagabonds of Europe; here they bask in summer, and lie curled up in winter, without fear of scorching in one season, or freezing in the other. Accordingly, hither they come shoals, just roll themselves ashore, and begin to swear and poll away as if they had been bred to the business from their infancy. She has, too, unhappily acquired a reputation for the mildness, or rather the feebleness, of her laws. There's no gallows in Pennsylvania. These glad tidings have rung through all the democratic club-rooms, all the dark assemblies of traitors, all the dungeons and cells of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Hence it is that we are overwhelmed with the refuse, the sweeping, of these kingdoms, the offal of the jail and the gibbet. Hence it is that we see so many faces that never looked comely but in the pillory, limbs that are awkward out of chains, and necks that seem made to be stretched." Nor was it pleasant for an embryo President of the great Republic to be handed down to posterity in this fashion, in a Summary of the Proceedings of Congress : — "Never was a more ludicrous farce acted to a bursting audience. Madison is a little bowlegged man, at once stiff and slender. His countenance has that sour aspect, that conceited screw, which pride would willingly mould into an expression of disdain, if it did not find the features too skinny and too scanty for its purpose. His thin, sleek air, and the niceness of his garments, are indicative of that economical cleanliness which expostulates with the shoeboy and the washerwoman, which flies from the danger of a gutter, and which boasts of wearing a shirt for three days without rumpling the frill. In short, he has, take him altogether, precisely the prim, mean, prig-like look of a corporal mechanic, and were he ushered into your parlour, you would wonder why he came without his measure and his shears. Such (and with a soul which would disgrace any other tenement than that which contains it) is the mortal who stood upon his legs, confidently predicting the overthrow of the British monarchy, and anticipating the pleasure of feeding its illustrious nobles with his oats." Sir Henry Bulwer gives instances to prove that Cobbett's virulence could be conveyed in a more delicate way when he thought proper: "Since then citizen Barney is become a French commodore of two frigates, and will rise probably to the rank of admiral, if contrary winds do not blow him in the way of an The worst of Cobbett and it is as bad as bad can be in its way - was what he forced before the public, after one of his astounding gyrations or apostasies, in the shape of an unblushing act of treachery or gles, his mode of acquiring knowledge, his marriage, and (above all) his daily life during his two years' imprisonment in Newgate, will conciliate sympathy, although they cannot be accepted as a set-off to the ingrained perversity of the entire public portion of his life. 66 Canning, the Brilliant Man," is good throughout, both in conception and execution his solid as well as his brilliant relief; and peculiar sources of informaqualities are artistically placed in bold 'tion have enabled the author to clear up passages in the life of this distinguished statesman which have hitherto been obscured or misunderstood. Restricted space compels us to confine ourselves to these, and to two or three others on which we ourselves can throw light. which actuated Mr. Canning when, on his What was the precise train of motives entrance into public life (1793), he left his original party, the Whigs, and took service with Mr. Pitt? The pending events in France had brought discredit on liberal opinions; but he was also influenced by circumstances of a mere personal nature: "The first incident, I was once told by Mr. John Allen, that disinclined Mr. Canning, who had probably already some misgivings, to attaching himself irrevocably to the Whig camp, was the following one: Lord Liverpool. then Mr. Jenkinson, had just made his appearance in the House of Commons. His first speech was highly successful. There is a young friend of mine,' said Mr. Sheridan, whom I soon hope to see on this side of the House answering the honourable gentleman who has just distinguished himself: a contemporary whom he knows to possess talents not inferior to his own, but whose principles, I trust, are very different from his.' This allusion, however kindly meant, was disagreeable, said Mr. Allen, to the youthful aspirant to public honours. It pledged him, as he thought, prematurely; it brought him forward under the auspices of a man, who, however distinguished as an individual, was not in a position to be a patron. Other reflections, it is added, followed." These other reflections strongly resemble those which were forced upon Quentin Durward by his uncle, Le Balafré, when expatiating on the difficulty of obtaining distinction under a chief like Charles the Bold, who fought at the head of a body of gallant knights and nobles : a barefaced untruth. The best of him was his domestic life, his management of his "The party then in opposition possessed, family, and his fortitude under severe trial. with the exception of Mr. Pitt, Lord Liverpool, The pictures which Sir H. Bulwer has and Mr. Dundas, almost every man distindrawn or laid before us of his early strug-guished in public life a host of formidable competitors in the road to honour and preferment, supposing preferment and honour to be attainable by talent. But this was not all. The Whig party, then, as always, was essentially an exclusive party; its regards were concentrated on a clique, to whom all without it were tools and instruments. On the other side, the prime minister stood alone. He had every office to bestow, and few candidates of any merit for official employments. "These were not explanations that Mr. Can ning could make precisely to the Whig leaders, but he had an affection for Mr. Sheridan, who had always been kind to him, and by whom he did not wish to be thought ungrateful. He sought, then, an interview with that good natured and gifted person. Lord Holland, Mr. Canning's contemporary, was present at it, and told me that nothing could be more respectful, affectionate, and unreserved, than the manner in which the ambitious young politician gave his reasons for the change he was prepared to make, or had made; nothing more warm-hearted, unprejudiced, and frank, than the veteran orator's reception of his retiring protégés confession: nor, indeed, could Mr. Sheridan help feeling the application, when he was himself cited as an example of the haughtiness with which the great Whig Houses looked down on the lofty aspirations of mere genius. The conversation thus alluded to took place a little before Mr. Pitt's proposals were made, but probably when they were expected. Mr. Canning, his views fairly stated to the only person to whom he felt bound to give them, and his seat in Parliament secured, placed himself in front of his old friends, and Colonel Fitz Patrick revenged them by the following couplet : The turning of coats so common is grown, Of a schoolboy turning his jacket."" George IV. was excessively annoyed by Mr. Canning's taking the Queen's side, although he held aloof from her party, and never publicly advocated her cause. His Majesty, also, was strongly prejudiced against him by regard for Lord Londonderry, whose quarrel he had privately espoused. The ease with which the royal objections or prejudices were overcome, and the rapidity with which the new Foreign Secretary rose into marked favour, have consequently remained a puzzle to the uninitiated. The solution is now given on unimpeachable authority. The Duke of Wellington, at the urgent desire of Lord Liverpool, undertook to lay before the King the reasons they deemed imperative for the appointment of Mr. Canning in succession to Lord Londonderry: "Two or three phrases of the conversation that took place on this occasion have been repeated to me by one likely to have heard them from both parties concerned. "Good God! Arthur, you don't mean to propose that fellow to me as Secretary for Foreign Affairs; it is impossible. I said, on my honour as a gentleman, he should never be one of my ministers again. You hear, Arthur, on my honour as a gentleman. I am sure you will agree with me. I can't do what I said on my honour as a gentleman I would not do.' he was not a courtier, nor a man of the world. "In the ordinary acceptation of the word, Living, as I have already stated, surrounded by a small clique of admirers, and little with soci ety at large, he confined his powers of pleasing, which were remarkable, to his own set. He had determined, however, on gaining George IV.'s good will, or at all events on vanquishing his dislike, and he saw at once that this was to be done rather indirectly than directly, and that it could best be done by gaining the favour of those ladies of the court whom the King saw most frequently, and spoke to most unreservedly. These were Lady Conyngham, and Madame de Lieven. For Lady Conyngham, George IV. had a romantic, almost boyish attachment; Madame de Lieven he liked and appreciated as the lady who had the greatest knack of seizing and understanding his wishes and making his court agreeable. She was a musician, and he was fond of music; she had correspondents at every court in Europe; knew all the small gossip as well as the most important affairs that agitated Paris, St. Petersburg, and Vienna, and he was fond of foreign gossip and foreign affairs. Her opinion, moreover, as to the manfashion was law, and George IV. piqued himners or capacity of any one in the world of self especially on being the man of fashion. "Mr. Canning resolved, then, on pleasing this remarkable lady, and completely succeeded. She became, as she afterwards often stated, sub jugated by the influence of his natural manner and brilliant talents; and the favour of Madame de Lieven went the further in this instance with the King, since he had previously a sort of prejudice against Canning, looking upon him and speaking of him as a clever literary politician, but not a "gentleman." This prejudice once removed, a man of wit, genius and information, had no inconsiderable hold on a prince whose youth had been passed in the most brilliant society of his time, and who was still alive to the memory of the sparkling wit of Sheridan and the easy eloquence of Fox. Lady Conyngham's alliance was still more important than that of Madame de Lieven, and one of Mr. Canning's first acts was to name Lord Francis Conyngham (since the Marquis) Under-secretary of State. This, indeed, not only pleased his mother, and pleased the King for that reason, but it satisfied his Majesty in a delicate way as to the desire of his minister to have every act of his administration brought under the cognisance of his royal master." The Princess de Lieven was one of the most distinguished members of the female Directory, commonly called Patronesses of Almack's, that ruled the fashionable world of London for more than a quarter of a century; she was the last of the great ladies who largely influenced European politics; and her power over an eminent French statesman, an eminent man of letters to boot, amounted to a fascination and a spell. If we mistake not, she is the authority for the curious anecdote that comes next: 'I shall not occupy your Majesty for more than five minutes. It is very desirable, as your Majesty knows, to send envoys, without delay, to the States of South America, that are about to be recognised.' The King groaned, and moved impatiently. 'I have been thinking, sir, it would be most desirable to select a man of rank for one of these posts (another groan). And I thought of proposing Lord Ponsonby to your Majesty for Buenos Ayres.' 'Ponsonby!' said the King, rising a little from his reclining position, a capital appointment! a clever fellow, though an idle one, Mr. Canning. May I ask you to undraw that curA very good appointment; is tain a little ? there anything else, Canning, that you wish me to attend to? From that moment, says the private and not unauthentic chronicle from which this anecdote is taken, Mr Canning's favour rose more and more rapidly, and arrived at a degree which justified a lady diplomatist, from whom we have the story, and who on entering the room one day found one of Lady Clanricarde's children on the King's knee, turning round to the minister and saying: 'Je vous fais mes compliments, Monsieur Canning, quel beau portrait de famille !'" Speaking of Mr. Canning's famous speech on the affairs of Portugal on the 12th December, 1826, Sir H. Bulwer says: "My general impression, indeed, was that this speech must throughout have produced as great an effect in delivery as it does, even now, in reading; but I was talking the other day with a friend who, then being a Westminster boy, was present at the debate; and he told me I was mistaken, and that with the exception of one or two passages such as those I have cited, there was a want of that elasticity and flow which distinguished Mr. Canning's happier efforts. Lady Conyngham had been supposed in early life to have greatly admired Lord Ponsonby, then the finest gentleman of his time, and distinguished in the memoirs of Harriet Wilson as the only man who ever looked well in a cotton night-cap. Lord Ponsonby, who had long been absent from England, returned from the Ionian Islands, where he held a small It is probable that not having had time, office, just about the period that the recognition amidst the business which the step he was tak of the South American colonies was being agi-ing had created, to prepare himself sufficiently, tated, not a little desirous to get a better place than the one he had quitted, and met Lady Conyngham at Lady Jersey's. The story of the day was, that Lady Conyngham fainted on meeting the object of her early admiration. This story reached the enamoured monarch, who took to his bed, declared himself ill, and would see no one.* All business was stopped. After waiting some time, Mr. Canning at last obtained an interview. George IV. received him lying on a couch in a darkened room, the light being barely sufficient to read a paper. What's the matter? I am very ill, Mr. Canning.' This was his usual resource when his love affairs went wrong. He took to his bed, and pretended to be dying from a self-inflicted wound in the arm, when Mrs Fitzherbert refused to sacrifice her honour to his desires. he had the air of being over-prepared, and, according to my friend, only rose in his reply to his full height as an orator, exciting his audience by that famous allusion to the position which England then held between conflicting principles, like Eolus between conflicting winds." Does this speech still produce a great effect in reading? Has Sir H. Bulwer recently As to the effect in tried the experiment? delivery, his friend's impression was right, except that he has placed in the reply the most remarkable passage of the opening speech. But why appeal to those who were We ourselves Westminster boys in 1826 ? — calidâ juventă· were present during the whole of the debate. Except during the |