had been suffered to go on about Lord Redesdale, he seemed to be getting into what I think the true manner for a public assembly. Canning has done well and ill. T. Grenville seemed last year to have made a good shoot, but I do not think he has done much this year. His speech on P. Patten's motion, last June, was of the highest order.

*

"P.S.-Nightingales not come yet, and it will be well if I do not quite miss hearing them this spring. It is a sad thing indeed, but I will do it so handsomely that I hope you will hear from your other correspondents that I have quite turned my mind to politics again, and am as eager as in former days. Pray remember to inquire at what time Nightingales usually appear and sing where you are? Here, you know, it is about the 12th of this month; and do the Spanish poets count them lively or melancholy?

"I say nothing about the Paris plot, or the Duke d'Enghien, because it is too horrible on all sides."

Ar the commencement of this volume we have marked the ground on which Mr. Pitt placed his defence of the war, and traced the course of Mr. Fox in assailing his position. But although the annals of Parliament contain no series of speeches more replete with wisdom, argument and wit than those in which

* 3rd June, 1803. P. Patten was member for Newton, in Lancashire. The plot of Pichegru and Georges against Bonaparte, discovered in February, 1804, and the execution of the Duc d'Enghien, in March, are here alluded to.

Mr. Fox, Mr. Grey, and Mr. Sheridan appealed to the House of Commons against the policy of the minister, their artillery produced little effect. Mr. Burke indeed gives the palm of ability to the Opposition. But his own fervid writings; the general alarm felt at the subversive doctrines and horrible massacres of the French republican government; the aid of more than half the parliamentary party which had hitherto followed Mr. Fox; and the entire confidence of the King made Mr. Pitt far stronger in war than he had been in peace; nor had his followers to blush for his inferiority in debate. With a majestic and flowing eloquence he vindicated the measures of his government; denounced the crimes, the ambition and the insincerity of the rulers of France; and with the weapons of sarcasm and lofty declamation parried the rapid and ever varying thrusts of his great rival. To his friends he expressed his admiration, that whenever he thought he had spoken better than usual Mr. Fox surpassed himself in his reply. Mr. Wilberforce, in his own person a master of the art of persuasion, confessed that for a time his mind was always overborne by the arguments of the one of these two great orators who spoke last in the debate.

The time arrived, however, when Mr. Fox was disgusted with a struggle so apparently hopeless. His habits, and with his habits his passions, had taken a new direction. He had left off gaming; he lived much in the country; he returned with increased and revived zeal to his literary studies; he had married a woman as affectionate and warm-hearted as him

self, but who, by her previous conduct was unfortunately disqualified from taking her place in society as his wife. Hence, with a fund of happiness in himself, he willingly and cheerfully resigned the prizes of ambition, and, ceasing from the struggle, stood by as a spectator of the games.

Such was the secession; a measure rather dictated by the inclinations of Mr. Fox and the desponding complaints of others, than founded on motives of policy and inspired by an enlightened foresight. Yet an abstinence from the usual course of opposition is not without at least apparent justification. The minister derives great advantage from constantly renewed debates followed by victorious divisions. The country is apt to attribute to unworthy motives perseverance in arguments which Parliament has constantly overruled. The people, left to themselves, may give to reflection and to facts that weight which they never would allow to a party engaged for a long time in thwarting their most favourite projects, and predicting the failure of their most cherished hopes.

But whatever may be the value of these reasons, it is certain that from 1797 to 1801 Mr. Fox's name appears but seldom in the parliamentary debates. In the collection of his speeches there are none from 1798 to 1801.

In 1801, however, occurred an event which entirely altered the aspect of affairs both at home and abroad. Mr. Pitt, alarmed by the state of Ireland, convinced that with a separate Parliament it would neither be safe to grant, nor wise to refuse political power to the

Roman Catholics, meditated the plan of the Union. He instructed Lord Cornwallis, then Lord Lieutenant, to endeavour to effect a Legislative Union, and the admission of Roman Catholics to political privilege on equal terms with the Protestants. Lord Cornwallis wrote that he could carry the first, but not the second of these measures. Mr. Canning, who was sitting with Mr. Pitt when he received this letter, exclaimed, "Then if I were you I would have neither." Mr. Pitt, however, reproving the rashness of a young politician, pursued his scheme. He seems to have contemplated pressing on the Union, and postponing with fair promises the consideration of the Roman Catholic claims. He appears to have obtained the assent of Lord Grenville, Lord Spencer, and Mr. Dundas, to this plan.

There was an obstacle however on which Mr. Pitt had not sufficiently reckoned, or which he hoped by his great authority, assisted by the unpopularity of his rival, to overcome.

The King entertained a fixed opinion against further concessions to the Roman Catholics. In 1795, when Lord Fitzwilliam wished to enlarge the boundaries of the Constitution, so as to embrace all the King's Irish subjects, George III., alarmed at the extent of the proposed changes, consulted Lord Kenyon, then Lord Chief Justice, on the subject of his coronation oath. He understood that oath to bind him not to assent to a repeal of the Test Act, or of the Acts inflicting disabilities on the Roman

Speech of Mr. Canning in the House of Commons.

Catholics. The King's own words, as used in a letter to Mr. Pitt, are these-" A sense of religious, as well as political duty, has made me, from the moment I mounted the throne, consider the oath that the wisdom of our forefathers has enjoined the kings of this realm to take at their coronation, and enforced by the obligation of instantly following it, in the course of the ceremony with taking the sacrament, as a binding religious obligation on me to maintain the fundamental maxims on which our constitution is placed, namely, that the Church of England is the established one, and that those who hold employments in the State must be members of it, and consequently obliged not only to take oaths against Popery, but to receive the holy communion agreeably to the rites of the Church of England." *

With these sentiments deeply engraved on his mind, the King was not likely to listen with complacency to any suggestion that, in order to render the Union efficient, it would be advisable to embrace the Roman Catholics in some liberal plan of policy. And when Mr. Dundas, in pursuance of such a suggestion, hinted that the coronation oath bound the King in his executive, and not in his legislative capacity, he was sharply rebuked by his Majesty with the taunt, "None of your Scotch metaphysics, Mr. Dundas." Mr. Pitt had, however, gone too far to retreat. He felt it necessary to state his opinions to the King, and to intimate his willingness to withdraw from the public service, adding, however, that at the personal

* Corr. with Mr. Pitt.