Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century

by James Richard Joy

II

GEORGE CANNING

POLITICAL POETRY

["The Needy Knife-Grinder," which follows, was one of the most notable contributions which appeared in "The Anti-Jacobin." It is scarcely necessary to point out its satire upon the humanitarian sympathies of those Englishmen who had been carried away by the ideas of the French Revolution. The verses—a parody of Stanley's "Sapphics"—were the joint production of George Canning and John Hookham Frere.]

THE FRIEND OF HUMANITY AND THE NEEDY KNIFE-GRINDER

FRIEND OF HUMANITY

Needy knife-grinder! Whither are you going?
Rough is the road; your wheel is out of order;
Bleak blows the blast; your hat has got a hole in't,
So have your breeches!

Weary knife-grinder! little think the proud ones
Who in their coaches roll along the turnpike
Road, what hard work 'tis crying all day "Knives and
Scissors to grind O!"

Tell me, knife-grinder, how you came to grind knives?
Did some rich man tyrannically use you?
Was it some squire? or parson of the parish?
Or the attorney?

Was it the squire for killing of his game? Or
Covetous parson, for his tithes distraining?
Or roguish lawyer, made you lose your little
All in a lawsuit?

Have you not read the "Rights of Man," by Tom Paine?
Drops of compassion tremble on my eyelids,
Ready to fall as soon as you have told your
Pitiful story.

KNIFE-GRINDER

Story, God bless you, I have none to tell, sir;
Only last night a-drinking at the Chequers,
This poor old hat and breeches, as you see, were
Torn in a scuffle.

Constables came up for to take me into
Custody; they took me before the justice;
Justice Oldmixon put me in the parish
Stocks for a vagrant.

I should be glad to drink your honor's health in
A pot of beer, if you will give me sixpence;
But for my part I never love to meddle
With politics, sir.

FRIEND OF HUMANITY

I give thee sixpence; I will see thee damned first,
Wretch! whom no sense of wrongs
Can rouse to vengeance!
Sordid, unfeeling, reprobate, degraded,
Spiritless outcast!

[Kicks the K-g, overturns his wheel, and exit in a transport of republican enthusiasm and universal philanthropy.]

THE GOVERNMENT OF ENGLAND.

[The following extract from a speech on Parliamentary Reform affords an excellent example of his style of eloquence.]

Other nations, excited by the example of the liberty which this country has long possessed, have attempted to copy our Constitution; and some of them have shot beyond it in the fierceness of their pursuit. I grudge not to other nations that share of liberty which they may acquire; in the name of God, let them enjoy it! But let us warn them that they lose not the object of their desire by the very eagerness with which they attempt to grasp it. Inheritors and conservators of national freedom, let us, while others are seeking it in restlessness and trouble, be a steady and shining light to guide their course; not a wandering meteor to bewilder and mislead them.

Let it not be thought that this is an unfriendly or disheartening counsel to those who are either struggling under the pressure of harsh government, or exulting in the novelty of sudden emancipation. It is addressed much rather to those who, though cradled and educated amidst the sober blessings of the British Constitution, pant for other schemes of liberty than those which that Constitution sanctions, other than are compatible with a just equality of civil rights, or with the necessary restraints of social obligations; of some of whom it may be said, in the language which Dryden puts into the mouth of one of the most extravagant of his heroes, that

"They would be free as nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in the woods the noble savage ran."

Noble and swelling sentiments! but such as cannot be reduced into practice. Grand ideas! but which must be qualified and adjusted by a compromise between the aspirings of individuals, and a due concern for the general tranquility; must be subdued and chastened by reason and experience before they can be directed to any useful end! A search after abstract perfection in government may produce in generous minds an enterprise and enthusiasm to be recorded by the historian and to be celebrated by the poet; but such perfection is not an object of reasonable pursuit, because it is not one of possible attainment; and never yet did a passionate struggle after an absolutely unattainable object fail to be productive of misery to an individual, of madness and confusion to a people. As the inhabitants of those burning climates which lie beneath a tropical sun sigh for the coolness of the mountain and the grove, so (all history instructs us) do nations which have basked for a time in the torrid blaze of unmitigated liberty too often call upon the shades of despotism, even of military despotism, to cover them—a protection which blights while it shelters; which dwarfs the intellect and stunts the energies of man, but to which a wearied nation willingly resorts from intolerable heats and from perpetual danger of convulsion.

Our lot is happily cast in the temperate zone of freedom, the clime best suited to the development of the moral qualities of the human race, to the cultivation of their faculties, and to the security as well as the improvement of their virtues; a clime, not exempt, indeed, from variations of the elements, but variations which purify while they agitate the atmosphere that we breathe. Let us be sensible of the advantages which it is our happiness to enjoy. Let us guard with pious gratitude the flame of genuine liberty, that fire from heaven, of which our Constitution is the holy depository; and let us not, for the chance of rendering it more intense and more radiant, impair its purity or hazard its extinction.