But the genius of one man, however great, can effect but little, unless suitably supported by others. The sagacious mind of Pitt had long seen that his party in Parliament were, with very few exceptions, no match for his numerous opponents, powerful both in talent and social position; among whom were Fox, Sheridan, Erskine, Horne Tooke, Whitbread, Nicholls, Courtenay, Fitzpatrick, the Dukes of Norfolk and Bedford, Lord Stanhope, the Duchess of Devonshire, and others. He was always anxious, therefore, to secure whatever available talent presented itself, and immediately on their appearance enlisted under his banners Canning, Jenkinson, Huskisson, and Castlereagh, all men of the same standing, for the first three were born in 1770, and the last in 1769.
The important assistance of Canning was immediately felt, for he was, in the words of Byron, “a genius—almost a universal one; an orator, a wit, a poet, a statesman”. Though he entered Parliament at the early age of 23 (in 1793), and attained the post of Under-Secretary of State for the Foreign Department two years after, he was by no means inexperienced either as a writer or as an orator; for while a student at Eton he had won distinction by his contributions to The Microcosm, a weekly paper published by the more advanced Etonians, and also in the discussions of their Debating Society, which were conducted with strict regard to parliamentary usages. And afterwards, while studying for the law, he took an active part in the proceedings of the debating societies of the metropolis, in which he achieved so much reputation as to lead to his introduction to Pitt, whose party he unhesitatingly joined.
Canning early saw the necessity of the Government’s possessing some literary engine, which, like the Whig Rolliad, published some years before, should carry confusion into the ranks of its enemies. In a lucky hour he conceived the idea of The Anti-Jacobin, a weekly newspaper, interspersed with poetry, the avowed object of which was to expose the vicious doctrines of the French Revolution, and to turn into ridicule and contempt the advocates of that event, and the sticklers for peace and parliamentary reform. The editor was William Gifford, whose vigorous and unscrupulous pen had been already shown in his Baviad and Mæviad; and among the regular writers were: John Hookham Frere, Jenkinson (afterwards Earl of Liverpool), George Ellis (who had previously contributed to the Whig Rolliad), Lord Clare, Lord Mornington (afterwards Marquis Wellesley), Lord Morpeth (afterwards Earl of Carlisle), Baron Macdonald, and others. These gentlemen entered upon their task with no common spirit. Their purpose was to blacken their adversaries, and they spared no means, fair or foul, in the attempt. Their most distinguished countrymen, whose only fault was their being opposed to government, were treated with no more respect than their foreign adversaries, and were held up to public execration as traitors, blasphemers, and debauchees. So alarmed, however, became Wilberforce and others of the more moderate supporters of ministers at the boldness of the language employed, that Pitt was induced to interfere, and, after an existence of eight months, The Anti-Jacobin (in its original form) ceased to exist.
The Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin is not exclusively political. The Loves of the Triangles, a parody on Dr. Darwin’s Loves of the Plants, is, in the opinion of a celebrated critic (Lord Jeffrey) of the highest degree of merit; as is also The Progress of Man, a parody on Payne Knight’s Progress of Civil Society; and The Rovers, a burlesque on the German dramas then in vogue, the extraordinary plots of which, as well as their language, alternately ultrasentimental and domestically bathotic, well marked them out for ridicule, is distinguished by sharp wit and broad humour of the happiest kind. Canning and his coadjutors in this piece did a real service to literature, and assisted in a purification which Gifford, by his demolition of the Della Cruscan school of poetry, had so well begun. Of The Friend of Humanity and the Knife-grinder it is unnecessary to speak; perhaps no lines in the English language have been more effective, or oftener quoted.
But Canning’s greatest power is shown in New Morality, which, being the last of the series, seems to have been reserved as a concentrating medium for his pent-up scorn and contempt of the Whigs and their adherents. So that their blows fall thick (for he was powerfully seconded by Frere, Gifford, and Ellis), they care little who suffer from them, and the modern reader is surprised to find Charles Lamb and other non-intruders into politics, figuring as congenial conspirators with Tom Paine!
It is somewhat difficult to regard Pitt in the character of a Wit and a Poet, as from the narrative of most of his biographers, he might be considered as uniformly cold, stiff, and unbending; but his intimate friend Wilberforce, in his Memoirs, thus describes him: “Pitt, when free from shyness, and amongst his intimate companions, was the very soul of merriment and conversation. He was the wittiest man I ever knew, and what was quite peculiar to himself, had at all times his wit under entire controul. Others appeared struck by the unwonted association of brilliant images; but every possible combination of ideas seemed always present to his mind, and he could at once produce whatever he desired. I was one of those who met to spend an evening in memory of Shakespeare, at the Boar’s Head, Eastcheap. Many professed wits were present, but Pitt was the most amusing of the party, the readiest and most apt in the required allusions.” It is not, therefore, at all unlikely, that he now and then contributed witty verses to The Anti-Jacobin, in addition to those which the Editor has, on probable grounds, ascribed to him in the present volume.
“Critical commentary,” says a critic of the previous edition, “on the merits of The Anti-Jacobin, would be superfluous. Its satire is distinguished for the terse language of its poignant personality, which was often excessively stinging, but seldom offensively coarse. Its best contributors, Canning and Frere, were not mere pamphleteers in verse, like the writers for The Rolliad. They had poetical inspiration and a sprightly joyousness springing from a genial play of the mental faculties. They were ‘Conservatives’ not only in their politics but in their loyal adherence to the ordinances and traditions of classical English literature. False sentiment, tumid diction, mawkish cant, were chastised by them with exemplary efficacy. On the fourth edition of the complete work (1799, 2 Vols. 8vo, containing both prose and poetry), they placed the epigraph, Sparsosque recolligit ignes; and in the very last paper (No. 36), the motto on discontinuance was exquisitely happy:—
“‘We shall miss thee;
But yet thou shalt have freedom.
So to the elements