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    fore . The last election , of 1820 was less warmly contested , his chief opponent being a gentleman of the name of Crprapton , who succeeded only in obt # iuiug 345 votes . During the latter years of his life , the termination of Mr . Canning ' s political career seemed problematical , though few persons , even but a short time since , would have anticipated its ; coming so early to a close . In 1818 he came into office as President

    of the Board of Control ; but leit England and abandoned his place , in preference to taking part in the proceedings against her Majesty the late Queen . Subsequently , in 1822 , he was named Governor of India ; and was on the point of again quitting the country , having actually taken leave of his constituents at Liverpool , for the purpose

    of proceeding to Bengal . At that very moment , however , the death of the Marquis of Londonderry suddenly opened tlie situation of Secretary for Foreign Affairs to him , a post which he accepted , and held until the change consequent upon the recent illness of the Earl of Liverpool , when it was his fortune to

    attain that high station to which his talents pre-eminently entitled him , and in which a long list of valuable services % o his country have , we feel little doubt , been cut short by his premature and regretted death . It is a curious circumstance , that Mr . Canning died in the same house in which Mr . Fox breathed

    his last ; and , like that distinguished statesman , but a few months only after his last acceptance of oflice . He has left two sons alive , and a daughter . The latter is the present Marchioness of Clanricarde ; the elder son is a captain

    in the navy ; the younger a lad still at school , who was brought from York during his father ' s illness . As Mr . Canning has been repeatedly attacked upon the subject of the pensions granted to other members of his family—to his mother and sisters—it becomes fair

    to add what he has said in his defence . His answer to this charge was , that when he first retired , in 1803 , from the office of Under Secretary of State , he was entitled to a pension of 500 / . a year ; and that , instead of taking that sum himself , he requested to have it nettled upon his relations . "

    ** Mr . Canning evinced over the companions of his boyhood a superiority of quick intelligence , to which there could not be fairly applied the usual term ' precocious . ' There was nothing premature in his early talent •*— nothing fallacious , forced , or disappointing . The lead which he took when a child , he

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    maintained through the intellectual tilts of youth , and through the sterner struggles of ambitious and unyielding manhood , until , after some partial defeats and vicissitudes , for which he was more to blame than fortune , he reached the ne pkts vitra of a British subject , and fell while the civilized world still cheered him with shouts of applause and felicitation .

    " To the prompt and sensitive excitability of Mr . Canning may be traced the impediments which retarded his final success , and which more than once threatened to frustrate his most aspiring efforts . If Mr . Canning could have

    subdued for a while the indignation tinder which he wrought against Lord Castlereagh , by means which afforded his personal enemies a pretext for representing him , though falsely , as an intriguer , the feelings of other members of the Portland Cabinet would have

    cooperated with him and with the public voice , and have expelled , with something like contempt , from office , the incompetent author and director of the ruinous Walcheren expedition . The issue of this indiscreet quarrel with Lord Castlereagh was , their simultaneous loss of office , and Mr . Canning ' s

    long exclusion . The more plausible and measured temperament of Mr . Canning ' s adversary introduced him again to power under Mr . Perceval , in the department of Foreign Affairs , in which situation he had the good fortune to inflict on Mr . Canning the deep disgrace of an overpaid and unnecessary embassy to Lisbon . This was the real blot on Mr .

    Canning ' s political emblazonment—one , indeed , which we are ready to acknowledge that a series of illustrious services have long since compensated and redeemed , if they have not entirely obliterated ; but which the faith and moral use of history impose upon us the reluctant duty of here affixing to the name of Mr . Canning . " That the earlier portions of this statesman ' s life exhibited no evidence

    compared with that which has flowed from every week and hour of its more recent progress , on which could be established any of Mr . Canning ' s now indefeasible claims to the reputation of a friend of human liberty , may be

    accounted for by the subaltern order of those duties which , until within these three years , and since the overthrow of Buonaparte , he had been called upon to discharge . ' An exception of coarse will be made for the time during which ht filled a Cabinet office under'Mr . Pitt and the Duke of Portland ; but then the

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    G 80 Obkttaru . — tturht Hon . George Canning .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1827, page 690, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1800/page/58/