lably his inferiors in intellect, and who were soon to display how far they could sink below him in political degradation; vexed his graceful faculties, exhausted his sparkling animation; and, after a brief period, clouded by the increasing embarrassments of useless allies and insidious adversaries, by painful consciousness, and the discovery that he had toiled for a shadow after all, tormented him out of the world. } Thus perished, after a four months' premiership, a minister of whom the nation had once formed the highest hopes; the friend of Sheridan, and with no slight share of his genius; the pupil of Pitt, and the ablest defender and most chosen depositary of his principles; a man of refined scholarship, the happiest dexterity of conversation, keen public sagacity, and the most vivid, diversified, and pungent oratory in the legislature. J Some suspicions were thrown on Canning's religion, from the circumstance, that in his last illness, he was not attended by a clergyman. But if this be not directly attributable to the rapidity of his disease, or the negligence of those round him, we cannot suffer ourselves to conceive that Christianity was either unknown or unfelt by him who could winte the following epitaph, one of the most pathetic and beautiful in the whole compass of the language. "TO THE MEMORY OF George Charles Canning, eldest Son of the Right Honourable George. Canning and Joan Scott his Wife; born April 25, 1801-died March 31, 1820. "Though short thy span, God's unimpeach'd decrees, Yet merciful in chastening, gave thee scope And, since this world was not the world for thee, "O! mark'd from birth, and nurtur'd, for the skies Simple as unwean'd infancy, and pure! Pure from all stain (save that of human clay, CHAPTER XX. The Catholic Question.` The statutes against popery in England and Ireland were the restrictions, not of a religious faith, but of a political faction; enacted, not against dissidents from the church of England, but against rebellious partisans of the house of Stuart. The question was one, not of the liturgy, but of the sword. The Stuarts lost the day. They were exiled; and the soldiers whom they left behind, were disabled by the provisions of law from again stirring up rebellion, and again shedding the blood of freemen in the cause of tyrants and slaves. But the decline of the exiled dynasty no sooner made the relaxation of those penalties in any degree safe, than they were relaxed. The oath of allegiance, leases for 999 years,† the full purchase of landed property, the extinction of all disabilities relative to education, the unrestrained public exercise of their religious rites and tenets; elevated * 13th and 14th Geo. III., cap. 35. By the act of 1782. J the sons of that soldiery, from the condition natural to a defeated army, to a rank of privilege never possessed by Protestants under a popish government. The question was then laid aside. It slept from 1782 to 1792, ten years of peace and singular prosperity in Ireland. But in 1789 France began to disturb the world. The manufacturing districts in the north of Ireland, much connected with America by trade and individual intercourse, rapidly adopted the idea of emulating the American revolt, while England was in the first perplexities of an approaching war. The Presbyterian of the north scorned the Roman Catholic of the south; and would have disdained the republic which was to be buttressed by the popish altar. But all that could embarrass government must be tried. Some millions of peasantry in tumult would form an important diversion; and the agents of a faction that owned neither a king nor a God, were sent out to tell the Roman Catholic that he was excluded from the favour of his king, and restricted in the exercise of his religion. The topic which was adopted by the Presbyterian republican to embarrass the English cabinet, was adopted, of course, by the whigs in the Irish parliament to embarrass the Irish minister. From Ireland it was transmitted for the use of opposition in England. The purpose in these pages is not to discuss the point of theology, but to give a glance at the progress of the question. After years of contest, it was brought into the cabinet by Canning. In his reluctant exile from office, he had taken it as the common burden of opposition, and he bore it back with him. It now formed the endless taunt of his late col leagues. Will you repeal the Test Act, and overthrow the establishment? Will you bring in Catholics to legislate for Protestants, and overthrow the Constitution?" was the perpetual outcry of the 66 champion, Mr. Peel, across the house, echoed by the congenial virtue of Mr. Dawson, and their retainers, and chiefly by the Duke of Wellington, who “could not comprehend the possibility of placing Roman Catholics in a Protestant legislature with any kind of safety, and whose personal knowledge told him, that no king, however Catholic, could govern his Catholic subjects without the aid of the pope.' Canning left the question as Fox had left it. Lor Goderich's short-lived ministry ran in and out of the cabinet with too breathless haste to decide on any thing. It perished of a fracas between two treasury officials, and expired on the road to Windsor. In 1828 the Duke of Wellington became prime minister. The empire, weary of the futile generation that had just dropped out of power, rejoiced at the accession of a man distinguished in the public service, bound to the national interests by the most munificent rewards, and pledged in the most solemn and voluntary manner to resist the demands of popery, But his first steps taught the nation the hazards of premature applause. The formation of his cabinet was assailed, in parliament, under every shape of ridicule. The merits of his colleagues were loudly declared to be all summed up in the words mediocrity and submission. The ministers were called clerks, and the cabinet-a "bureau adjoining the Horse Guards." It must be owned that the premier's antipathies did not fall chiefly on individuals trained by the habits of their lives to unquestioning obedience. To the astonishment of England, her civil offices were filled with soldiers! the minister's quarter-master-general governed the colonies; his aid-de-camp governed the civil department of the army; his subordinates in the field were the administrators of employments so important to constitutional security, that they had never before gone out of civil hands. But if the principle of submission be essential to public happiness, the cabinet, the quarter-master, the aid-de-camp, the whole array of this martial government, lived on the breath of the premier's nostrils; and they have justified the sagacity of the theory by the most unmurmuring acquiescence in the memory of man So great a power has not been in the hands of any English subject since Wolsey, but one-and that one was Cromwell! For purposes still undeveloped, it became the determination of this formidable depositary of public wisdom, to admit Roman Catholics into the legislature. The first step was, to repeal the Test Act, a barrier erected by the founders of the constitution. It was left to whig hands, the fittest for the work of constitutional overthrow; and the honour of pulling it down was given to a descendant of that Russell who had cemented the establishment with his blood. The Test Act might have been obsolete; the dissenters might have suddenly become lovers of the establishment; the establishment might have suddenly acquired some new principle of immortality; yet the eagerness of Episcopal assent given to its overthrow, showed that some of the English prelacy had more confidence in the minister than knowledge of human nature. Other clerics, of less exalted rank, but less confiding, saw, in the very suggestion of this repeal, a summons to the consecrated guardians of Protestantism, to collect their scattered strength, to abandon their habitual dependence on politicians, and to show that the highest trust which can be reposed in earthly hands, was not to be sacrificed to a fond security in the promises of office. The repeal was passed, and the darkest prediction was instantly verified. It was found to be a direct preliminary to that measure, which its own chief abettor pronounced a breach of the constitution," 66 Yet if the nature of the repeal escaped English G g |