IN the sketch which I am about to attempt of this eminent personage, I propose to myself nothing more than to make those who shall take the trouble of reading it, more familiarly acquainted with the Ex-Premier than they are likely to be from merely newspaper knowledge of him as a public man. A complete examination of the career of Earl Grey, or even an historical and political sketch of his life, would involve a consideration, or at least a retrospect of the political transactions of Great Britain for the last fifty years. Upon any thing so elaborate I do not mean to enter:-not that the "life and times" of the noble lord are less worthy of being written and read, than the life and times of other orators and statesmen, which have been composed with care, and studied with profit, but simply because I have something else to do, more within my grasp at the present moment, and more fitted for the entertaining, as well as instructive pages of the Dublin University Magazine.

Earl Grey is, I believe, the last survivor of those, whose fame as political orators formed one of the obscure wonders of our boyhood-the last of that distinguished band who made the British senate conspicuous throughout the world for thirty years, between 1785 and 1815, and to whom it would seem there are to be no successors in this age of “reform,” and “universal knowledge." Earl Grey was a partner in the political strife, in which Burke, and Pitt, and Fox, Wyndham, Sheridan, and Grattan, Percival, Romilly, and Erskine, Plunkett, Whitbread, and Ponsonby, Canning, and Castlereagh, and Wilberforce, and Tierney, bore a part, and now these are all gone but one, and in that one, the fires of eloquence are burned out, and nothing but bitter ashes remain. It may be that an age of eloquence is not on that account an age of wisdom, far less of happiness; but still it is impossible for any man unburdened by the vulgarizing spirit of utilitarianism, to contemplate

a House of Commons with such men in it as those I have enumerated, and to contrast with it the present herd of legislators, without being moved to regret-peradventure (as Lord Brougham would say) to indignation. But this is a digression-Lord Grey is, I believe first heard of in House of Commons debates, in the year 1787-he was then Mr. Grey, and three and twenty, fluent, fiery, and wrong. Mr. Pitt was then the minister, and finding it necessary to dismiss one of two postmasters, who had quarrelled, and could no longer row in the same boat, he sent adrift Lord Tankerville, who was connected with the Greys in some way or another, that those who study that interesting work called "the Peerage" may tell I cannot. Mr. Grey attacked the minister in such a way as to call forth a rebuke in Pitt's peculiar manner of dignified severity. He said the language which had been used could only be attributed to the honourable member's youth, and the short time he had had a seat in the House. Upon this Fox got up, and congratulated the House upon possessing such a Nestor as the Right Hon. Chancellor of the Exchequer, to check the intemperate sallies of youth. Pitt, though nearly four years Prime Minister, was himself scarcely seven and twenty at the time, so the joke must have been exquisite when accompanied with the rich mellow humour of Fox's jocular manner. The talents of Mr. Grey must have immediately become conspicuous, even in the House of Commons of that day, for in the early part of the following year (1788) we find him one of the impeachers of Warren Hastings, and winding up the "Benares charge," which had been opened by no less a personage than Fox himself.

From thenceforward, and throughout the dreadful times which followed, convulsing the whole civilized world with the throes of democratic fury, we find Mr. Grey foremost among the mad political speculators of the time. A man

of sensibility (for without it no one can be an accomplished rhetorician as Mr. Grey, then Citizen Grey, certainly was), he was destitute of real feeling, and appears to have deemed even the most horrible acts of the French revolution as the sublime accomplishments of freedom and justice. As Burke said of Fox, the French revolution seemed to have so much shaken him as to have shaken his heart into the wrong place. We trace him thenceforward, the continual champion of France, and even after she had thrown aside the mockery of liberty with which her career of blood and blasphemy began, and had voluntarily adopted a military tyranny conformable with the vain-glorious unmanly spirit of the nation, still was Mr. Grey un-English enough to oppose himself to the France-detesting feeling which then animated Britain, and his political efforts were divided between urging peace with the French, and parliamentary reform upon the English people. It would be difficult to say in which of these projects he was more unsuccessful. The nation hated France; and laughed at parliamentary reform as extravagant nonsense. Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. In the year 1800, when the union with Ireland was debated in the British House of Commons he was among the most strenuous of its opponents-how little did he think to live to see the day when he should compose speeches for his sovereign, in which all his knowledge of language would be tasked, for expressions strong enough in which to declare his unalterable determination that that union should be maintained with all the power and means of the monarchy!

Upon the death of Mr. Pitt, Mr. Grey, at that time become Lord Howick, joined the administration formed by Lord Grenville, as First Lord of the Admiralty. In this situation he remained from February to September, when Mr. Fox died, and Lord Howick succeeded him as Secretary for Foreign Affairs. This ministry yielded to the indignation of the sovereign, and the contempt of the public in the following March, and from that time, until the famous "Reform" era of November, 1830, Earl Grey was in opposition. Overtures were indeed

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made to him in conjunction with Lord Grenville, in the year 1809, upon the break up of the Duke of Portland's administration, and twice in the year 1812, first upon the expiration of the regency restrictions, and afterwards upon the death of Mr. Percival, but on all these occasions Lord Grenville and Lord Grey declined accepting office upon terms which would compromise the political principles they had professed. It must not, however, be supposed that Earl Grey (he came to the title by the death of his father in 1807) still retained the wild democratic views of the days of "citizenship," and the French Revolution. He had attained a distinguished position as a leader in a party, which however opposed to the policy of Tories, was still desirous of maintaining, upon what were called more liberal principles, the monarchy and aristocracy of the country. had held high office under the King, and his ambition was no longer that of being the most ardent democrat among democrats, but of leading upon Whig principles the policy of the King's government. No longer an advocate for the direct overthrow of our institutions, in which he felt he had a strong personal interest, he desired to distinguish himself as one who would improve and modernize it while he preserved the old fabric. He had subsided from the red heat of a French democrat, to the tepid medium of a Whig aristocrat. Time flowed onthe close of the war, so triumphant for England, and so humiliating for France, utterly destroyed the credit of all Whig prophecies, and Lord Grey grew old, the respectable leader of a feeble opposition in the House of Lords; gradually, it would seem, becoming more and more hopeless of any triumph of Whig principles in the politics of England, and submitting, with a sort of pensive contentment, to a state of things which experience told him "worked well" for the country, though so much opposed to the dreams of his youth, and so different from that which since his maturer years he had maintained to be best.

I never saw Lord Grey 'till he was in his sixty-third year-he is now seventy, and the seven years have obviously done their work upon him. Had he been a man of deep thought,

the last three, would have killed him. Lord Grey without having noble features, looks like a noble man. He is tall and thin, with a slight stoop in his shoulders. His face is somewhat flat, and his nose not prominent, but a very expansive brow, and a pale cast of thought, with something like an expression of pain or sorrowfulness, which seems to be the habitual cast of his countenance, gives him much the air of a man of intellect. There is, however, occasionally about his eyes, that which gives an expression of humour, and this occasional expression, he has in common with every man of acknowledged ability, whom it has been my fortune to see. I should, perhaps, except Carl Maria Von Weber, the great musical composer, whose expression was undeviatingly of the profoundest melancholy, but when I saw him the hand of death was well nigh upon him: perhaps in happier days the light of mirthfulness was not a stranger to his eyes. There is a particular expression about Lord Grey's mouth, which should be more akin to humour than to dignity, and seems to result from some irregularity or projection of the teeth: this with his occasional sternness, and his grand Roman air, which he is so ready to assume, led to the epithet of Curius Dentatus, bestowed upon him by the most eminent literary humorist of our days. The more prominent characteristics of Lord Grey as a speaker, are dignity and distinctness-perhaps I should rather say, were, for in the latter quality he has fallen off. He is in oratory, as in appearance and manners, rather of the old school. When he addresses the House in a set speech, one wishes that he had on the toga, in order that our Ciceronian associations might be complete. He has not the rugged and subduing energy of Brougham, nor the managed passion and captivating brilliancy which Canning possessed, but in precision, in completeness, and a certain stern gracefulness which commands, if it does not win attention, he is superior to both. He seems made for asserting the dignity of his "order," and yet it is plain that his attachment to that order, is a sentiment, and not a principle. It is indeed but too palpable that throughout Lord Grey's career, his judgment has been made

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subordinate to feeling and to vain imagination. When very young, he had a passion for popular liberty, and his judgment, instead of being employed in sifting and examining the real value, or probable practical result of the working out of this popular sentiment, was devoted to the practical means of extending that sentiment, and thwarting and annoying those who refused to acknowledge its all-sufficing excellence. middle life a sense of dignity, of station and personal ability, with a correllative sentiment of condescension to the common people, which he, like other Whigs, called political liberality, appear to have been the motives according to which his judgment worked and performed its subordinate task with no small skill. But commanding judgment, Lord Grey has not. A sentiment in favor of reform, he certainly had, and upon that "principle," as he called it, he undertook the administration, but his judgment was not devoted to the framing of the measure which was destined to change essentially the governing spirit of the country-others proposed to him what should be done, and because it accorded with the sentiment that possessed his imagination, he adopted what was proposed. Had he been compelled (for nothing but compulsion would have driven him to such matter-of-fact work) to frame a a Reform Bill, and thus to bring his sentiment to the test of judgment, and consideration of practical effects, I am morally certain, from observation of his character, that he would have submitted a plan of reform, much more honest, and much less revolutionary than that which such bilious apes as Lord Durham and Lord John Russell impudently framed.

From the beginning to the end of Lord Grey's career (for I suppose it may now be said to have politically ended) he has been led by some vague sounding political sentiment what has caught hold of his imagination. While the French revolution was raging in its worst fury, he appealed to the House of Commons in favor of "the rights of man." He guarded himself specially from being considered a disciple of Tom Paine, (for what reason, except that his pride revolted from being the follower of a stay-maker, though an abler and wickeder man than

himself, it is hard to say,) but still he would maintain that "the rights of man should be the foundation of every government, and that those who stood out against those rights were the enemies of the people." Now, this is obviously nothing better than sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. The "rights of man" for which the orator pleaded, and would perhaps have died, had no reference to any practical line of policy by which a nation could be governed-but there was something grand in the expression, and the unanimous cry of maddened millions, though it be nonsense, is still not without a certain captivating sublimity. Forty years passed away, and we find the same orator pleading before the House of Lords in favour of a political sentiment equally vague, and if possible, in the mouth of a practical politician, more foolish-the leading star of his politics is now "the spirit of the age." It is the perfection of political wisdom-it seems to yield to the 'spirit of the age." And why ?-what is the meaning of this? what distinct political act or series of acts does this declaration point to? No one can tell, but it is a fine sentiment-it is said to have been uttered by Buonaparte, when meditating in his island prison, upon the causes of his fall from the mightiest empire that a modern ever swayed-an empire achieved by the force of his own genius and good fortune. At last his genius was baffled, and his good fortune deserted him, and after the melo-dramatic manner of his speech (he acted very differently), he settles the reason of his downfall in an epigram-he had not consulted the "spirit of the age!" Lord Grey is just the man to have his fancy struck by such a sweeping abstract method of accounting for what is easily traceable to a series of practical blunders-he is impressed with the grandeur of a mighty monarch hurled from his seat of power, and philosophising upon the rock of punishment and despair. He hears him declare that not to have consulted the spirit of the age-not to have yielded to the popular will, was the fatal error that led to his overthrow, and Lord Grey's imagination, smitten with the sentiment, receives it as though it were the declaration of unerring wisdom. Yet

if he would but consult his experience it would at once confirm him that Napoleon achieved his greatness, by leading and not by following the spirit of the age, and that it was only because he ceased to be prudent and vigilant― because he ceased to govern the spirit of his age and nation, with that resistless energy and sleepless caution which led to his elevation, that he fell from it to such punishment as may Heaven, in its justice, visit upon all blood-stained tearless tyrants!

Thus has Lord Grey, from first to last, been deficient in sound judgment, and devoted to some fascinating abstraction, but his peculiarity in this respect is this-that, whereas, fanciful persons generally make their imagination subservient to their judgment, when they have any, he makes his judgment subservient to his imagination, or his feelings, and will frequently deliver orations, logical and piercing, and quite unimaginative in their character, which have neither their origin, nor their object founded in anything that sound judgment would not dismiss as nonsensical.

But to return to the glance at Lord Grey's political career, which I abandoned a little while ago, in order to make such of my readers as were not so before, personally acquainted with his lordship. I trust they will now keep him in their mind's eye as a thoughtful, pensive, aristocratic-looking old gentleman, but with the capability of being severe, or condescendingly kind, as the occasion demands.

I said that Lord Grey grew old, the leader of a feeble opposition; but a change took place in 1827, when Mr. Canning succeeded Lord Liverpool as prime minister, and which, as it led to one of the most remarkable oratorical displays of Lord Grey's whole life, it will be proper to notice. From the time that Lord Grenville ceased to be able to take any part in politics, Lord Grey had every reason to consider himself as the head of the Whig party

the man whom the Whigs, as a party, were to follow as their chief. We may judge then, of the extent to which the pride of such a man, was offended, when he found his party deserting him, to enlist under the banners of another chief, who had all his

life been associated with the Tories, Yet this the Whigs did, when they crossed to the government side of both houses of Parliament, to support Mr. Canning's "no reform" administration; and actually took office under him, as many as could get it. Earl Grey was left alone-a chief deserted by his followers, who left him, too, to enlist under the banners of one who was

his rival in oratory, and his opponent in politics. He could not long "keep his proud soul under;" the administration was settled in April, and on the 11th of May, 1827, at the close of a debate about the corn laws, he poured forth his bitter philippic, and his piercing complaint. It would take pages to do justice to that brief, yet memorable harangue, in which he rent to shreds and tatters the political reputation of Canning, and pointed at him with bitter scorn. The polished sarcasm involved in his compliments to his noble and honorable friends who, "doubtless on grounds the most satis factory to their own consciences," had joined the new minister, was the most terrible politeness that ever was listened to. This speech arising, as it did, from anger, and indignation, and hatred, had no passion in it. It was a consummate piece of art, and ended with an appeal to the feelings of his auditory at once so vigorous, and so touching, as to completely subdue the house to the power of the orator. The following is the very remarkable peroration to which I allude-remarkable when it was uttered, from the

freedom and fervency of its personal statements, but much more remarkable now, when we compare these statements with the events which have since taken place :

continue to think as I do; it does not diminish my regret at being compelled to dissent from so many with whom I formerly acted, and whom I still continue so highly to respect; I now feel myself almost a solitary individual. Nothing can be further from my intention than a union with the party in opposition to government, for, from that party I differ on most questions, as widely as the poles who support the administration, in the are asunder. Neither can I join those construction of which, as an administra tion, I have no confidence. The only principles which I have professed throughout life, and when I find that the meaprinciples, they shall have my support. sures of government accord with those When they introduce measures repugnant, in my opinion, to those principles, I will oppose them; but I deprecate the idea of joining the standard of a party, as a party, opposed to government. who have done me the honor to attach any importance to my opinions are aware, that, for some years, I have been withdrawing myself more and more from a direct interference in the politics of the country. As long, however, as I do remain, I am anxious to keep in that situation in which I can do what I consider the most good. To take a more active part in public business is quite out of my intention-non eadem est aetas non mens. With the noble Marquis(Lansdowne) I concur in most questions, and to him I will, on every occasion, give my support where I conscientiously can, but at the same time, I must declare that I will never shrink from opposing any, and every measure which I cannot conscientiously approve.

course left to me is to adhere to those

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I shall not, however, again embark upon the troubled sea of politics, upon which, all my life, until now, I have navigated-God knows with how little success; but, at the same time, with the consolation of knowing that I have done so with an honest and approving conscience."

No one attempted to answer this speech; the house instantly dispersed, and the impression of it was carried away, unmingled, unbroken. But it broke Canning's heart-at least so I have heard from those who knew him. In the three months which he lived

The Whigs and Canning party.