you that his Majesty, has given directions for a careful revision of the Financial State of the Country, with a view to every diminution of expenditure which may be found consistent with the necessary demands of the Public Service, and with the permanent interests, good faith, and honour, of the nation.

My Lords, and Gentlemen; "His Majesty is confident that you participate with his Majesty in the pleasure which his Majesty derives from the indications of a gradual revival of employment in the manufacturing districts.

"His Majesty trusts, that although your deliberations on the Corn Laws have not led, during the present session, to a permanent settlement of that important question, the consideration of it will be resumed by you early in the ensuing session, and that such an arrangement of it may finally be adopted as shall satisfy the reasonable wishes, and reconcile the substantial interests, of all classes of his Majesty's subjects."

TH

very

HE session, which was thus closed, was one in which little business had been done, but the events of which had excited more hopes and fears, and had given it a character of more lively and intense interest, than would have been called forth by the usual routine of political discussion. It had borne, in a great degree, a personal character; it was to man, the soldier and his sword." It was destined to be speedily followed by an event which stretched that interest to its fullest bent, and taught one of the most impressive lessons, that the history of politics presents, of the vanity and uncertainty of ambition.

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The health of Mr. Canning had been in a very delicate state even at the commencement of the session, and the mental anxiety which followed was but little favourable to its restoration. It was not the mere ordinary contests of politics that now claimed his attention: to these he had been too long and too successfully habituated, to regard them as any thing but scenes of triumph; in that arena, there was no weapon of which he was not master, no opponent whom he could need to fear. Neither was it the cares of empire, which the triumph of his talents and his ambition had now laid upon him, that depressed his spirits, and harassed his feelings; he possessed

fice of theirs. His pride could not but be deeply wounded, when he found that his power in any degree depended upon the good pleasure of those whom it had long been his boast and his delight to confound by his eloquence, or make the laughing-stock of the country by his wit: much more must "the iron have entered into his soul," when he found that his very fate was placed in their hands. Mr. Canning, too, was a man of kindly and amiable feelings; and the rupture of old intimacies, and the necessity of conciliating old enmities, where no cordial confidence could ever be reposed, brought with it an irritation and disappointment a thousand times more annoying and exhaust ing, than, to such a head, the mere anxieties of government could ever have become. His care-worn appearance betrayed that the mind was ill at ease within: mind and body panted equally for repose. Soon after the rising of parliament he was visited by an attack of illness, which seemed, however, to yield to medical treatment, and he went down to the duke of Devonshire's seat at Chiswick, to seek tranquillity and enjoy a purer air. The disease returned; inflammation had commenced; it proceeded with a violence and rapidity which set art at defiance; and Mr. Canning expired at Chiswick (the same house in which Mr. Fox had breathed his last), on the morning of the 8th of August, after having been prime minister for only four months.

This unexpected event produced a much more lively sensation in the country, than the stroke which, in the beginning of the year, had driven lord Liverpool from public life. All our kindly feelings, all our respect for intellectual power, all our admiration of high and suc

cessful exertion, join in calling forth almost involuntary regrets, that one who has just gained a splendid, and a hard-earned, prize, should be snatched from it for ever, when he has scarcely been allowed to grasp it. Mr. Canning, too, possessed in his own character, enough to justify the admiration which attended him when living, and the regrets that followed him to the grave. Europe lost in him the ablest statesman, and the Commons of England the finest orator of his day. Imbued with the very spirit of the classics, he was a most accomplished scholar; and though early introduced into public life, and almost constantly occupied, from the entrance of his manhood, in the details of official business, and the bickerings of party politics, the practical wisdom which he thus treasured up, never impeded the felicity with which, on all occasions, he brought into play the favourite subjects of his youthful studies. His fancy was elegant and prolific ; his taste was exquisite; and to it, much more than to strict logic, were his orations indebted for their charms and their effect. He seldom followed closely out any regular train of argumentation; he never trammelled his reasoning in the stiff forms of the dialectician; but he caught with facility the general bearings, and striking relations of ideas: with never-failing tact he seized those views of his subject which were sure to tell most immediately upon his auditory, and his opponents; and his thoughts flowed from him in a stream of uninterrupted fluency, in periods of the most sounding and graceful declamation. Yet he was never inflated or inane; it would scarcely be possible to select from his speeches a single sample of bom→

There were parts of his public life in which his steadiness of purpose and consistency of conduct might be questioned; there were others in which it might be doubted whether perfect good faith to his fellow-labourers had not been sacrificed to ambition; and the last act of his life, that coalition, by which he chose to be first, through the support of former opponents, rather than to remain second in name among former friends, was more than questionable. Mr. Canning's best and widest fame will always rest, like that of lord Chatham, on what he performed as a Foreign Secretary. English men will always remember him as a public servant, who, in that capacity, proudly maintained the honour, and asserted the dignity, of the country among the nations; and they will remember him as having done that, than which the world presents no nobler exploit-as having made himself, by the mere force of talent, Prime Minister of England.

It was not unnatural to expect, that, on the removal of Mr. Canning, whose influence alone seemed to have brought, and to have kept together, the heterogeneous materials of which the cabinet was composed, its discordant elements would again fly asunder. Very few changes, however, took place, and their effect was, to bring back into office a portion of Mr. Canning's former friends. The duke of Wellington, who had felt himself personally slighted by the deceased premier in the formation of his ministry, almost immediately resumed the command of the army, but without any seat in the cabinet. Lord Goderich took the reins of government, as First Lord of the Treasury, and Mr. Huskis◄

to which the franchise might conveniently be transferred.

The session closed before any effective proceedings were taken for the disfranchisement of either of these boroughs.

Lord Althorp obtained the appointment of a committee to inquire into the mode of taking the poll at County elections; and colonel Davies obtained a similar one to inquire into the mode of taking the polls at elections for cities and boroughs. The principal object of lord Althorp was, to get rid, if possible, of the enormous expense of a county election, which, as matters stood, was such that only a man of very large fortune could venture to become a candidate. He stated that the last election for Yorkshire, though it had never come to a poll, had cost at least £.120,000; if a poll had lasted fifteen days, it would have cost the parties at least half a million of money. On that occasion a gentleman of large fortune, for whom the greatest shew of hands appeared, was compelled to abandon all thoughts of standing a poll, in consequence of the ruinous expense which must have followed that determination. Lord Althorp likewise brought in, and carried through, a bill for the better prevention of corrupt practices at elections, and for diminishing the expenses of elections. The object of it was, to prevent substantial bribery from being perpetrated, under the mask of merely giving employment, and therefore to deprive all persons of the right to vote, who should be employed by a candidate in the election. It was notorious, it was said, that, at elections, different nominal offices were created, to be filled by voters who were classed as plumpers, and re

ceived double the pay of split votes. It was not meant that the provisions of the bill should apply to any real and fair agent of a candidate, but to that spurious collection which went under the names of runners, flagmen, and musicians, who had never played upon an instrument in their lives, till they were enrolled at an election. This was just another mode of paying them for their votes; and therefore it was right that, in that election at least, they should have no voice. On the suggestion of Mr. Spring Rice it was farther determined with a view of promoting the purity and diminishing the expense of elections-to prohibit the distribution of ribbands and cockades. Both parts of the bill were opposed, the one as being unjust, the other as being frivolous, inefficient even in trifles, and utterly beneath the dignity of the House. The law of bribery, as it stood, was quite sufficient to reach a purchased voter, even though he lurked under the disguise of a would-be fiddler or drummer. To disfranchise every voter who was employed as an agent by a candidate, was to stigmatize the whole profession of the law. If the candidate were prevented from paying his agents openly, except at the sacrifice of their votes, he would be driven to the necessity of paying them, after the election, more lavishly and extravagantly than he otherwise would have done. They would be active and zealous friends during the election, and would be paid after it as active and zealous agents. The candidates, to be sure, might select their agents from among persons who were not voters; but what unqualified person would feel the same interest, or exert the same energies, as a qua