sliding scale, and provided that foreign wheat should be admitted at a 20s. duty when the price had fallen to 60s., the duty to fall as the price rose, and to rise as the price fell. The bill passed the House of Commons by large majorities before the Easter recess, but was knocked on the head by the Duke of Wellington, who carried an amendment in the House of Lords to prohibit bonded corn from being brought into the market till the price rose to 66s. The bill was withdrawn, but Canning introduced a temporary measure for allowing the bonded corn then in the country to be brought into the market under the conditions prescribed by the bill, and the measure passed both houses without opposition. Canning was very angry at the loss of the bill, and made some remarks on the conduct of the House of Lords, which had better been spared. But he was smarting under the treatment which he supposed himself to have experienced from the aristocracy, and especially from a violent attack made upon him by Lord Grey on 10 May, which stung him so severely that he is said to have contemplated taking a peerage himself that he might answer him in person. The speech has been answered very effectively by his private secretary, Mr. Stapleton, in his ‘Political Life of Mr. Canning;’ and as it is probably only a digested report of what he heard from Canning's own lips, it may be accepted as the case for the defence which the great statesman would have desired to place on record.
But his career was now fast drawing to a close. He struggled through the session against a combination of difficulties peculiarly trying to one of his warm and sensitive disposition, and which did not require to be aggravated by bodily sickness. No mercy, however, was shown to him; and when parliament was prorogued on 2 July he left the House of Commons, which he had so long ruled ‘as Alexander ruled Bucephalus,’ a dying man. The Duke of Devonshire invited him to Chiswick for change of air, but it was all in vain. On 29 July he was able to see the king, when he told his majesty that ‘he did not know what was the matter with him, but he was ill all over.’ On 1 Aug. his life was seen to be in danger; and on the 5th his condition was made public. On Wednesday the 8th he died in the very same room in which, twenty-one years before, died his early friend Charles Fox. Canning had three sons and a daughter. His eldest son (b 25 April 1801) died 31 March 1820. The second son, William Pitt, a captain in the navy, was drowned at Madeira 25 Sept. 1828. The third son, Charles John, afterwards Earl Canning, is separately noticed. Canning's widow was created Viscountess Canning 22 Jan. 1828, with remainder to Canning's heirs male. She died 15 March 1837, and was succeeded by her only surviving son, Charles John. The daughter, Harriett (d. 8 Jan. 1876), married Ulick John, first marquis of Clanricarde.
Canning's toryism was the toryism of the second Pitt, modified by the new class of considerations which the French revolution had imported into political life. It was founded, in the first place, on the maintenance of the royal prerogative, and included among its primary tenets the repeal of the Roman catholic disabilities and the gradual removal of restrictions upon trade and commerce. But Canning did not share his master's views on the question of parliamentary reform, probably because it was demanded in 1820 in a very different spirit and with very different objects from those which actuated the reformers of 1780. Canning believed, in fact, that the old system was capable of being administered in a thoroughly popular manner, and with that conviction he naturally shrank from a change which was confessedly hazardous, and which, even if successful, would only remove anomalies of no practical importance. Accustomed as we are now to the doctrine of inherent right and the dominion of abstract ideas, we no longer feel the force of Canning's reasoning. But in his own day it rested on a basis which was generally recognised, or the ancient régime would never have been tolerated so long.
Both at home and abroad Canning aspired to hold the balance even between the two extremes, between oligarchical and democratic, between despotic and licentious, principles. That in carrying out this idea he should have given offence to both parties is only what we should expect to discover; and in truth this one great fact is at the bottom of nearly all the difficulties which he experienced, and most of the mysteries which attach to him. As, on his return to the foreign office in 1822, he found, or thought he found, the liberal party in Europe the weaker of the two, he threw the whole weight of England into that scale. At home, on the contrary, as he seems to have thought that the two parties were differently balanced, he brought his genius to the support of conservatism. Hence his approval of the Six Acts and his opposition to parliamentary reform.
Of Canning as an orator conflicting accounts have been handed down to us; but they all agree in this, that in what may be called literary eloquence he has had few
