Historical Characters: Mackintosh, Talleyrand, Canning, Cobbett, Peel

by Baron Henry Lytton Bulwer Dalling and Bulwer

There is no period at which an eminent person is so little considered, so much forgotten and disregarded, as during the few years succeeding his decease. His name, no longer noised above that of others by the busy zeal of his partisans, or the still more clamorous energies of his opponents, drops away suddenly, as it were, from the mouths of men. To his contemporaries he has ceased to be of importance—the most paltry pretender to his place is of more;—while posterity does not exist for him, until the dead are distinctly separated from the living; until the times in which he lived, and the scenes in which he acted, have become as a distant prospect from which the eye can at once single out from amidst the mass of ordinary objects, those which were the memorials of their epoch, and are to become the beacons of after-generations.

The French, who are as fond of putting philosophy into action as we are coy of connecting theory with practice, marked out, at one moment, a kind of intermediate space between the past and the present, the tomb and the pantheon; but the interval of ten years, which they assigned for separating the one from the other, is hardly sufficient for the purpose.

We are, however, now arrived at the period that permits our considering the subject of this memoir as a character in history which it is well to describe without further procrastination. Every day, indeed, leaves us fewer of those who remember the clearly-chiselled countenance which the slouched hat only slightly concealed,—the lip satirically curled,—the penetrating eye, peering along the Opposition benches,—of the old parliamentary leader in the House of Commons. It is but here and there that we find a survivor of the old day, to speak to us of the singularly mellifluous and sonorous voice, the classical language—now pointed into epigram, now elevated into poesy, now burning with passion, now rich with humour—which curbed into still attention a willing and long-broken audience.

The great changes of the last half-century have, moreover, created such a new order of ideas and of society, that the years preceding 1830 appear as belonging to an antecedent century; and the fear now is—not that we are too near, but that we are gliding away too far from the events of that biography which I propose to sketch. And yet he who undertakes the task of biographical delineation, should not be wholly without the scope of the influences which coloured the career he desires to sketch. The artist can hardly give the likeness of the face he never saw, nor the writer speak vividly of events which are merely known to him by tradition.

II.

It is with this feeling that I attempt to say something of a man, the most eminent of a period at which the government of England was passing, imperceptibly perhaps, but not slowly, from the hands of an exclusive but enlightened aristocracy, into those of a middle class, of which the mind, the energy, and the ambition had been gradually developed, under the mixed influences of a war which had called forth the resources, and of a peace which had tried the prosperity, of our country;—a middle class which was growing up with an improved and extended education, amidst stirring debates as to the height to which the voice of public opinion should be allowed to raise itself, and the latitude that should be given, in a singularly mixed constitution, to its more democratic parts.

Mr. Canning was born on the 11th of April, 1770, and belonged to an old and respectable family originally resident in Warwickshire.[110] A branch of it, obtaining a grant of the manor of Garvagh, settled in Ireland in the reign of James I., and from this branch Mr. Canning descended; but the misfortunes of his parents placed him in a situation below that which might have been expected from his birth.

His father, the eldest of three sons—George, Paul, and Stratford—was disinherited for marrying a young lady (Miss Costello) without fortune; and having some taste for literature, but doing nothing at the bar, he died amidst the difficulties incidental to idle habits and elegant tastes.

Mrs. Canning, left without resources, attempted the stage, but she had no great talents for the theatrical profession, and never rose above the rank of a middling actress. Her son thus fell under the care of his uncle, Mr. Stratford Canning, a highly respectable merchant, and an old Whig, much in the confidence of the leaders of the Whig party and possessing considerable influence with them. A small inheritance of 200l. or 300l. a year sufficed for the expenses of a liberal education, and after passing through the regular ordeal of a private school, young Canning was sent to Eton, and subsequently to Christ Church, Oxford. At Eton no boy ever left behind him so many brilliant recollections. Gay and high-spirited as a companion, clever and laborious as a student, he obtained a following from his character, and a reputation from his various successes. This reputation was the greater from the schoolboy’s triumphs not being merely those of school. Known and distinguished as “George Canning,” he was yet more known and distinguished as the correspondent of “Gregory Griffin;”—such being the name adopted by the fictitious editor of the Microcosm, a publication in the style of the Spectator, and carried on solely by Eton lads. In this publication, the graver prose of the young orator was incorrect and inferior to that of one or two other juvenile contributors, but some of his lighter productions were singularly graceful, and it would be difficult to find anything of its kind superior to a satirical commentary upon the epic merits of an old ballad: