about a new series of political combinations, and obliged the King to accept Canning as leader of the House of Commons. His appointment as Foreign Secretary put an end to all thoughts of India. Thirty-three years later his son had the same offer, and accepted it.
In 1824, Charles Canning was sent to Eton, where his father's brilliant reputation as statesman, man of letters and wit, ensured him a cordial reception. Dr. Goodall, the Provost, ordained that the Minister's son should undergo his entrance examination, not, as was usual, at his tutors, but in his father's house,—a questionable privilege, so far as young Canning's feelings were concerned, for it involved the consequence that the dreaded ordeal should be passed in his father's presence. Mr. Chapman, afterwards Bishop of Colombo, the official on whom the duty devolved, has recorded the anxiety with which the father watched the boy's progress through his examination. The passage selected was the description, in the Aeneid, of the storm which shattered the fleet of Aeneas, and the famous aposiopesis in which Neptune turns away from punishing the outbreak of the rebel winds to the gentler task of calming the waves and restoring peace to the ocean—
'Quos ego—sed praestat motos componere fluctus.'
The trial—a severe one for youthful nerves—was
north of the town, overlooking the sea. Here he would sit, enjoying the prospect, while a son of the house, William Ewart Gladstone, was playing on the strand below.—Bell, 321.
