"In the mean time, whilst Mr. Lambton is a 'dolt and an idiot,' I am content to be a 'liar and a slanderer, and an assassin,' according to the same inimitable master of the vulgar tongue.

"I am, sir, your obedient servant,

"The Author of the

Letter to the Right Hon. G. Canning."

It was hard indeed for Liberty to have so ready and so ruthless an antagonist as Mr. Canning. This minister was not satisfied with those legitimate and classical weapons he was so well skilled to wield, forgot the days of the "Anti-jacobin," and vociferated against and challenged every one whose pen or voice was raised in opposition to him. Thus,

[[192]]whether squibbing "the Doctor," as Lord Sidmouth was called, fighting my Lord Castlereagh, cutting heartless jokes on poor Mr. Ogden, flatly contradicting Mr. Brougham, swaggering over the Holy Alliance, or quarrelling with the Duke of Wellington, he was in perpetual personal scrapes,—one of the reasons which created for him so much personal interest during the whole of his parliamentary career. No imaginative artist, fresh from reading that career, would sit down to paint him with the broad and deep forehead, the stern, compressed lip, the deeply thoughtful and concentrated air of Napoleon. As little would the idea of his eloquence or ambition call to our recollection the swarth and iron features, the bold and haughty dignity, of Strafford. We cannot fancy in his eye the volumed depth of Richelieu's, the volcanic flash of Mirabeau's, or the offended majesty of Chatham's. We should sketch him from our imagination as we see him identically before us, with a countenance rather marked by intelligence, sentiment, and satire, than meditation, passion, or sternness,—with more of the petulant than the proud, more of the playful than the profound, more of the quick irritability of a lively temperament in its expression, than of the fixed or fiery aspect which belongs to the rarer race of men, whose characters are wrought from the most inflexible and violent materials of human nature. We do not wish to deny that Mr. Canning was an orator, a wit, and a poet. Such talents and accomplishments, however, are not of pre-eminent importance to the situation

[[193]]which he occupied at his death. A premier ought to be the bold opposer of corruption, the solid friend of his sovereign, and the uncompromising champion of the people's rights. He should always remember that the security of the throne arises from the interest which the sovereign possesses in the hearts of his subjects, and that all attempts to stifle their voice, under a sense of grievances, must tend to alienate their affections, and inevitably lead to similar calamities which, in other countries, have been produced by arbitrary and corrupt measures. Whether Mr. Canning was such a statesman, we need only refer to his general vacillating conduct to his superiors in office, and to the return made in 1820, that this gentleman had received from the country, during his public association with government, two hundred thousand pounds! Upon the demise of Mr. Canning, a pension was granted, by act of parliament, to the trustees of the family, of three thousand pounds per annum, and his widow, shortly after, created a peeress!

The ensuing motley ministry, headed by Lord Goderich, (late Mr. Robinson) soon exhibited symptoms of its inefficiency to stand against the powerful phalanx of Toryism, then in array to oppose every thing like liberty. The philosopher, however, deeply deploring the many vicissitudes, the varying process, through which Opinion has to pass in order to be refined to Truth, but calmly aware that the sense of a people never ultimately retrogrades, might have observed through the clouds which, at this period,

[[194]]dimmed the political horizon, the sun of Liberty darting forth its smiling beams, and exhibiting signs of a speedy victory over the murky enemies of mankind,—the brighter period, when a more enlarged intelligence would necessarily triumph,—when warlike Tory despotism, founded on a feverish desire to keep the people down by the bayonet, would wear out its own harassed existence, and a system of freedom, sanctioned and confirmed by a long previous disposition of thought, would be realized, and the spirit and letter of that solemn compact, made and ratified between the crown and the people in 1688, be finally restored to the country.

No Englishman, who cherishes in his heart a love of freedom, and who is at all conversant with the history of his country from its earliest era down to the period of the revolution, can be insensible of the acquisitions procured at that eventful period,—of the accumulation of strength gained by the popular branch of the constitution, the limitation to the power of the crown, and the extension of the admitted and declared rights of the people. Before the revolution, we were the slaves of kingly despotism, and the House of Commons itself was as much subservient to the tyranny of the throne as the personal liberty of the subject. We have heard much talk about Magna Charta, and the triumph over John at Runnymede, by the people,—who, by the way, had nothing to do with the struggle, for it was the struggle of the barons and the king, the former of whom in their several domains were as