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Replied the knight: "So she but come
I quail not 'neath thine arm;
Thou'st sworn by Him we both adore
She should be safe from harm."
Yes, yes," the Emir cried: "'twas so;
But see! the ship's in port;
Away, my Moors and lead her in;
It, will be glorious sport!"

Then back he flings the curtain fold-
Deep crimson glows the sea-
And, leaning on his saber-hilt,
Stands in expectancy-
Muttering all grimly in his beard:
"I never could have thought.
A woman all this weary way

Her captive lord had sought.

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From the Edinburgh Review.

CANNING'S LITERARY REMAINS.*

Ar the risk of startling many of our readers, we avow our conviction that the Right Hon. George Canning has never been fairly judged or duly appreciated by his countrymen. In Europe and America, he symbolizes a policy; in England, he is little better than a name. "There died the last of the rhetoricians," was the exclamation of a great northern critic and man of genius. Yet the brilliant effusions, the "purple patches," of this so-called rhetorician were underlaid and elevated by more thought and argument than would suffice to set up a host of the "practical men," who complacently repeat and dwell upon the sneer. His sacrifices in the cause of religious liberty were great and palpable. For that cause, as he truly said, he had surrendered power at a period (1812) when he would readily have bartered ten years of life for two of office. Side by side with Huskis. son, of whose views he was the most eloquent exponent, he was (after Pitt) the first eminent Tory who embraced the doctrines of Free Trade. Yet Peel, who twice over resisted the progress of enlightened opinion till he could resist no longer without dismembering the empire or risking a war of classes, is imperishably enshrined in men's minds and memories as the statesman to whose welcome although tardy abandonment of long cherished errors the nation stands indebted for Catholic Emancipation and cheap bread.

Canning's death, indeed, was in every sense of the word untimely. It took place at the period most unfavorable for his fame; for the intermediate ground he had hitherto occupied between the

* Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin: comprising the cele brated Political and Satirical Poems, Parodies, and Jeux-d'esprit of the Right Hon. George Canning, the Earl of Carlisle, Marquis Wellesley, the Right Hon. J. H. Frere, W. Gifford, Esq., the Right Hon W. Pitt, G. Ellis, Esq., and others. With Explanatory Notes, by CHARLES EDMONDS. Second edition, consider

ably enlarged. With Six Etchings, by the famous

caricaturist, JAMES GILLRAY. London: 1854.

two great parties, somewhat analogous to that of the amphibious race of LiberalConservatives in our own time, had inevitably prevented him from enjoying the sympathy or, cordial support of either. Nay, it had occasionally exposed him to the enmity or suspicion of both, and he needed a year or two of power to inaugurate a well-defined policy, and form a strong party of his own. Nature.had intended Canning for a Whig. His opinions were enlightened; his sympathies were liberal; and if he had been born ten years later, we entertain no doubt that he would have cast in his lot with that great party of reform, which has labored with so much success, first in opposition, and afterwards in power, to regenerate the institutions and to expand the policy of England. But Mr. Canning entered public life at the moment when a fierce Tory reäction, excited by the monstrous excesses of the French Revolution, had counfounded Liberalism with Jacobinism, and when Mr. Pitt himself sacrificed to repression and to war the more enlarged views with which he had entered on the administration of public affairs. Bred in this school, Canning's impetuous disposition flung him into the tide of party at its flood. His wit and his eloquence were devoted to a cause which was not that of mankind; and he was habitually engaged in warfare with those whose policy and whose labors he might, in more favorable times, have applauded and shared. Towards the close of his career these liberal tendencies, which belonged to his generous nature, forced their way through the restraints of party; and the Tories, faithful to their practice of hunting down the men of genius whom accident or tradition their head, became his bitterest enemies have placed at may and harried him to the grave. The consequence was that in the prime of his life and the heyday of his fame, the greatness of his talents was not recognized by the Whigs; and that the brilliant part he played from 1820 to 1827 was ma

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ligned by the Tories. Our own. honored | own exquisite humor was the finest proally, Sydney Smith-haud impar con duct of sense and reason-the steel point gressus was the most formidable and of the feathered shaft that went swift persevering of his assailants. Mr. Can- and unerring to the mark? At the same ning and his parasites were the subjects time, we must make ample allowance of the matchless comparison of the blue for the asperity which was conventionally bottle fly-" the bluest, grandest, merri- permitted to combatants, with tongue or est, most important animal in existence;" pen, fifty years since. Let it also be reand throughout the whole of his celebrat-membered that, if Sydney Smith did not ed letters, Peter Plymley persisted in spare Canning or his "parasites," Cantreating Canning, as a mere "joker. of ning had not spared some of Sydney jokes," and thus summed up his merits Smith's dearest and most esteemed and demerits in the year 1898> friends; and, in reviving the memory of their swashing blows at the distance of half a century, we feel the same admiration for the wit and wisdom displayed on either side, irrespective of personal and party motives, as we do in reverting to Dryden's portrait of Achitophel or Pope's sketch of Sporus. In a retrospective view of satirical literature which throws a vivid light on political and social history, it matters little whether any given specimen of irony or invective was aimed by a Whig at a Tory, or by a Tory at a Whig.

"I can only say I have listened to him long and often, with the greatest attention; I have used every exertion in my power to take a fair measure of him, and it appears to me impossible to hear him upon any arduous topic without per-. ceiving that he is eminently deficient in those solid and serious qualities, upon which, and upon which alone, the confidence of a great country can properly repose. He sweats, and labors, and works for sense, and Mr. Ellis always seems to think it is coming, but it does not come: the machine can't draw up what is not to be found in the spring: Providence has made him a lightjesting paragraph-writing man, and that he will remain to his dying-day.

"When he is jocular, he is strong; when he is serious, he is like Samson in a wig: any ordinary person is a match for him; a song, an ironical letter, a burlesque ode, an attack in the newspaper upon Nicholl's eyes, a smart speech of twenty minutes, full of gross misrepresentations and clever turns, excellent language, a spirited manner, lucky quotation, success in provoking dull men, some half information picked up in Pall Mall in the morning-these are your friend's natural weapons; all these things he can do; here I allow him to be truly great; nay, I will be just, and go still farther-if he would confine himself to these things, and consider the facile and the playful to be the basis of his character, he would, for that species of man, be universally allowed to be a person of a very good understanding: call him a legislator, a reasoner, and the conductor of the affairs of a great nation, and it seems to me as absurd as if a butterfly were to teach bees to make honey. That he is an extraordinary writer of emall poetry, and a diner-out of the highest order, I do most readily admit. After George Selwyn, and perhaps Tickell, there has been no such man for this half century."

But in this passage our incomparable friend was unconsciously giving point and currency to the very objections often urged against himself, and which always are urged against every wit or man of genius who has the misfortune to startle dullness from its self-complacency. How long did it not take, in his own case, to compel the universal admission that his

The world is a jealous world, and reluctantly accords the palm in more than one line of superiority or walk of excellence to the same competitor. If Canning had not shone in light literature, or "small poetry," his claim to rank as an orator of the first class would have been conceded long prior to 1808. If his other titles to fame had not subsequently merged and been forgotten in his career as a statesman, we should not now be under the necessity of asserting his independent and distinct right to rank as a man of letters; for could all his contributions to light literature be collected, he would be admitted to fall short of few political satirists of the more fugitive order in grace, point, or felicity, and to equal the best of them in fecundity and variety. And this we say with especial reference to Swift; Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, the author of Anticipation, (Tickell,) and the other principal contributors to the Rolliad; Peter Pindar, Gifford, Theodore Hook, and Thomas More, who, we think, is more indisputably the first in this order of composition than in any other which he touched and adorned.

The importance not long since attached to Latin prosody and the artistical combination of longs and shorts, was hardly exaggerated in the witty remark, that a false quantity in a man was pretty nearly

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The subject of Swearing was judiciously chosen; and its importance is hightened with a comic seriousness which would have provoked an approving smile from the Short-faced Gentleman, obviously proposed as a model by the youthful essayist. For example:

"It is an old proverbial expression, that there. go two words to a bargain; now I should not a little admire the ingenuity of that calculator who how.many, oaths go to one in these days: for I could define, to any tolerable degree of exactness, am confident that there is no business carried on, from the wealthiest bargains of the Exobabge, to the six penny chafferings of a St. Giles's buckster, in which swearing has not a considerable share. And almost every tradesman, "meek and much a liar,' will, if his veracity be called in question, coolly consign to Satan some portion of himself, payable on demand, în case his goods be not found answerable to his description of their quality.

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"Nay, even the female sex have, to their no small credit, caught the happy contagion; and there is scarce a mercer's wife in the kingdom but has her innocent unmeaning imprecations, her little, oaths softened into nonsense, and, with squeaking treble, mincing blasphemy into odsbolike a sucking dove, ay, an it were any nightindikins, slitterkins, and such like, will swear you gale."

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tantamount to a faux pas in a woman. | son's expressions) a bottom of good sense. The Marquis of Wellesley would appear, from his private correspondence, to have been prouder of his Latin verses than of his Indian policy; and the late Lord Tenterden devoted more of his long vacation to the polishing of his odes in the language and manner of Horace, than to the consolidation of statutes or preparation of judgments. In their younger days, which were also Canning's, graceful scholarship was a high social and literary distinction in itself. But notwithstanding the brilliant example set by Sir George Lewis and Mr. Gladstone, the class within which the taste and the capacity for these pursuits are still cultivated has gradually become more select than numerous, and the fame of any modern statesman would be deemed equivocal if it required to be supported or enhanced by a school exercise or a prize poem. We therefore lay no stress on Canning's contributions to the Musa Etonenses; but we pause at the Microcosm, which, though the production of boyhood, contains many passages which would reflect no discredit on the most accomplished mind in its maturity The formal title of the collected papers runs thus: "The Microcosm, a Periodical Work, by Gregory Griffin, of the Col It was Swift, we believe, who, happenlege of Eton. Inscribed to the Rev. Dr. ing to be present when a party of accomDavies. In two volumes." It consists of a plished friends were eagerly talking over series of papers after the manner of the a game at cards, completed and presented Spectator, puqlished weekly, (on the Mon- them with an estimate of the proportion day,) from Nov. 6, 1786, to July 30, 1787, which their oaths bore to the rational or both inclusive. The concluding number intelligible portion of their discourse. contains the will of the editor, Mr. Gre- Hotspur tells his wife that she swears like gory Griffin, by which he bequeaths" the a comfit-maker's wife; and Bob Acres' whole of the aforesaid essays, poems, let-theory of sentimental swearing must have ters, etc., etc., to my much-beloved friends, J. Smith, G. Canning, R. Smith, and J. Frere, to be among them divided as shall be hereafter by me appointed, except such legacies as shall be hereafter by me assigned to other my worthy and approved friends." Amongst the special bequests we find: "Item. To Mr. George Canning, now of the College of Eton, I do give and bequeath all my papers, essays, etc., etc., signed with B." The best of these are No. 2, on Swearing; Nos. 11 and 12, Critique on the Heroic Poem of the Knave of Hearts; and No. 30, on Mr. Newbery's Little Books, including a parallel between the character of Tom Thumb and that of Ulysses. Each of these is remarkable for an easy and abundant flow of humor, with (to borrow one of Dr. John

been freshly remembered in 1787. Yet
there is both novelty and ingenuity in
Canning's mode of enforcing the same ar-
gument; and the recollection of Addison's
commentary on Chevy Chase rather en-
hances the pleasure with which we read
his youthful imitator's critical analysis of
what he designates the epic poem begin-
ning:

"The queen of hearts
She made some tarts
All on a summer's day."

If self-love did not blind the best of us to our own errors and absurdities, almost every modern editor or commentator who has aspired to emulate the conjectural, and often happy, audacity of Warburton, might fancy that the quiet irony of the

following paragraph was leveled at him- which seem to dispense with experience. self:

"All on a summer's day."

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But examination and analysis may possibly suggest a simpler solution, by demonstrating that the knowledge in question really amounts to little more than cleverness in tracing character and conduct to motives and springs of action which do least credit to mankind. "What Knowledge of life !" exclaim pit and boxes, when Mrs. Candor and Sir Benjamin Backbite are turning their intimate acquaintance into ridicule, or when Mirabell tells Millamant that a man may

as soon

"I can not leave this line without remarking, that one of the Scribleri, a descendant of the famous Martinas, has expressed his suspicions of the text being corrupted here, and proposes, instead of All on, reading Alone, alleging, in the favor of this alteration, the effect of solitude in raising the passions: But Hiccius Doctius, a high Dutch commentator, one nevertheless well versed in British literature, in a note of his usual length and learning, has confuted the arguments of Scriblerus. In support of the present reading, he quotes a passage from a poem written make a friend by his wit, or a fortune by about the same period with our author's, by the his honesty, as win a woman with plain celebrated Johannes Pastor, (most commonly dealing and sincerity," Yet a diligent Jack Shepherd,) entitled An Elegiac perusal of works like Rochefoucauld's Epistle to the Turnkey of Newgate,' wherein the Maxims, or Grammont's Memoirs, gentleman declares, that rather indeed in compli- may supply ample materials for the crea ance with an old custom, than to gratify any par- tion of these fine gentlemen, coquettes, ticular wish of his own, he is going and scandal-mongers, whose conventional and heartless cynicism derives its essential piquancy from the expression and the form.

"

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All hanged for to be
Upon that fatal Tyburn tree.'

Now, as nothing throws greater light on an author than the concurrence of a contemporary writer, I am inclined to be of Hiccius's opinion, and to consider the 'All' as an elegant expletive, or as he more aptly phrases it, 'elegans expletivum."

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There are several other papers, from which, space permitting, we should be glad to quote; and although Canning's are the gems.of the publication, it may be cited as a whole to show how rapidly the tone, or what some may call the cant, of the professional essayist or critic may be caught, and how effectively it may be employed by the youngest tyro in the art. It is hardly conceivable that lads of sixteen or seventeen can have thought out for themselves, or fully appreciated, the conclusions they lay down or the canons they apply; yet there is little in their writings by which they could be distinguished from their elders. of the same average rate of talent, except what is to their advantage, namely, their supe. rior freshness and vivacity. Just so, it is a remarkable fact, that the best of our comedies, commonly supposed to show the nicest insight into life and manners, have been produced by their respective authors at an age when they must have taken most of their applauded knowledge of society upon trust. We hear much, of the intuitive powers of genius, and it certainly does sometimes arrive at surprising results by intellectual processes

2

"Broad is the road, nor difficult to find,
Which to the house of Satire leads mankind;
Narrow and unfrequented are the ways,
Scarce found out in an age, which lead to Praise."

We can hardly say of Canning's satire what was said of Sheridan's, that

"His wit in the combat, as gentle as bright, Never carried a heart-stain away on its blade."

But its severity was redeemed by its buoyancy and geniality, whilst the subjects against which it was principally aimed gave it a healthy tone and a sound foundation. Its happiest effusions will be found in the Anti-Jacobin which was set on foot to refute or ridicule the democratic rulers of Revolutionary France and their admirers or apologists in England, who, it must be owned, were occasionally hurried into a culpable degree of extravagance and laxity by their enthusiasm. The first number of this celebrated publication appeared on November 7, 1797; the thirty-sixth and last on July 9, 1798.. The collected numbers in prose and verse form two volumes octavo. The poetry was reprinted in a separate volume in 1799; and this volume has since been edited, with explanatory notes, by Mr. Charles Edmonds, who brought acuteness, discrimination, an appreciating spirit, and the most exemplary diligence to the performance of his task. He has taken ex

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