of Leyden, and at his recommendation took into his house a gentleman qualified to instruct him. His embassy at the Hague was brilliant and successful. In 1744, he was admitted into the cabinet on his own terms, and was soon after intrusted with a second embassy to Holland, in which he confirmed the good opinion he had won by his first mission. The skill and dexterity he exhibited were universally admitted. Nor was he more remarkable for a quick insight into the temper of others, than for a command of his own. In foreign languages and history he was equally a proficient. He wrote and spoke French with the ease and purity of a native; he had a competent knowledge of German and Italian, and after he had attained his thirtieth year, applied himself to the study of Spanish with successful zeal. With the classical authors of antiquity he had been from his boyhood familiar, and though he had too much sense to make prosody the subject of an undue study, he wrote Latin prose with correctness, ease, and purity. But he never permitted any one of these accomplishments to interfere with, though he rendered them all subsidiary to the better transaction of the public business. On all occasions he was the friend and patron of men of letters, and in his second embassy to the Hague was accompanied by David Mallet. In 1746, as we before observed, he held the seals of secretary of state, but in his great public object-the peace, he could make no progress. In January, 1748, he resigned, withdrawing to private life, but still taking a prominent part in the House of Lords. In that assembly his speeches were more admired and extolled than any others of the day. Horace Walpole had heard his own father-had heard Pitt-had heard Pulteneyhad heard Wyndham-had heard Carteret ;-yet he declared in 1743, that the finest speech he ever listened to was one from Chesterfield.*

Little more than a quarter of a century after the resignation of Chesterfield, a major of militia, qualified by studies and attainments to supply the void caused by his retirement, entered the House of Commons as member for the borough of Liskeard, by the favour of Lord Elliot; but though the ministry of the day were obliged to resort to Edward Gibbon, to Dr. Lee, and to Lord Mansfield, to draw up a state paper in answer to the manifesto of the King of Prussia, yet the historian of the "Decline and Fall" was never attaché, or secretary of legation, or chargé des affaires, or envoy, or minister plenipotentiary, or ambassador, or principal secretary of state; and the only public dis

Lord Mahon's Life of Chesterfield.

HENRY FOX, PITT, THE SHELBURNES, HAWKESBURY.

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tinction he ever attained was that of a lord of trade and plantations, a place which may be filled before another year by such shadowless nonentities, such lackeys in Peel's livery, as we could readily name, if naming were needful.

Henry Fox, one of the principal secretaries of state in 1755, and again in 1762, and William Pitt, the first Earl of Chatham, secretary in 1756, are names which belong to history. The Earl of Shelburne, too, who was secretary in 1766, was a more accomplished and learned man in statesmanship than either Henry Fox or Chatham, and profoundly skilled in foreign politics; but so fleeting and evanescent is fame, that he is scarcely ever spoken of, excepting among the studious and the learned. Of the Weymouths, Rochfords, Suffolks, Stormonts, and Hillsboroughs, it is unnecessary to speak. The second Pitt knew little of foreign politics, and less of foreign courts, though he was far from being so shamefully ignorant of the one or the other as the Joseph Surface of our day. He was without the benefit of much foreign travel, having never proceeded further than the wretched town of Corunna, in Galicia, and the greater portion of the force and vigour of his mind, more especially in his earlier career, was devoted to domestic and trading questions, and to those fierce parliamentary contests in which he exhibited such consummate energy, loftiness, and strength. In later life, indeed, the war with revolutionary France, and the almost personal contest with Napoleon, deeply engaged his attention—and he grappled with and mastered the subject;but his views, though always ably supported, and enforced with clearness, energy, and eloquence,-were sometimes rash, obstinate, and headstrong;-and it appears, from the diary of Lord Malmesbury, recently published, that he was urged on by younger, more venturesome, shallower, and less sagacious persons, by whom he was followed, flattered, and occasionally deceived. That he might have been a great diplomatist and negotiator is self-evident; that he was so nowhere appears. Some of the ablest of Lord Hawkesbury's state papers, it is well known, were written from his dictation. It is evident he had a familiar acquaintance with the doctrines of public and international law. His preparatory studies for the bar, and during the short time he continued an attendant at Westminster Hall, must have ripened and improved this knowledge; but though a man scarcely fit to be more than Pitt's secretary, it is abundantly evident that Lord Hawkesbury knew more of the ordinary routine of diplomacy, and had read vastly more on the subject of treaties and negotiations, than William Pitt.

The rival of Pitt, too, Charles Fox, was a greater proficient in this part of statesmanship. He had travelled more in early life, and had read infinitely more on these subjects, having a predilection for such studies. Lord Grenville, and his brother Thomas, recently deceased, had, however, a greater knowledge of foreign courts, foreign statesmen, and the provisions of treaties, than any men of their day, with the exception of the eminent civilian, Dr. Lawrence. But Lord Grenville and the right hon. Thomas Grenville, though men of amazing information and research, and of the most carefully cultivated understandings, were both wanting in the attributes of genius, though Lord Grenville possessed all short of this rarest gift.

The late Earl Grey, then Lord Howick, succeeded Mr. Fox as foreign secretary. Though the fact was not generally known, Lord Howick had a better knowledge of foreign politics than any statesman of his day, with the exception of the late Lord Holland, the present accomplished Earl of Harrowby, and the late Earl of Malmesbury,-who, though a man of great sagacity, temper, and knowledge of details, was deficient in the highest, possibly also in the higher, qualities of intellect. Earl Grey had in early life, as Mr. Grey, travelled for two or three years upon the Continent; and though twenty-one or twenty-two years had elapsed between the period of his return and his assumption of the foreign portfolio, yet he kept up his knowledge of foreign courts and foreign statesmen, and of the language of diplomacy-French. We have ourselves heard his private secretary, in 1807-the late Hon. Robert Talbot-state that he has handed him a draft of a despatch written on his knee in his place in the House of Commons, the French of which was perfectly pure and idiomatic. Mr. Canning and Lord Wellesley both held the foreign portfolio after Lord Howick, and though neither of them were accomplished modern linguists, yet both must ever be considered in the light of firstrate statesmen. Both were finished orators, accomplished scholars, and elegant writers; and the state papers of the one and the other will long survive the occasion which called them forth. Both were ambassadors too-the one at the court of his Most Faithful Majesty, and the other to the Supreme Junta of Spain. But the embassy to Lisbon was a gross job, and the eloquent and sprightly Canning had but an otiose employment. The embassy to Spain, of the Marquess of Wellesley, originated in a proposition made by Mr. Canning, then secretary of state for the foreign department, in the spring of 1809, to the Marquess of Wellesley. The embassy lasted from August till November, 1809, when the ambassador was recalled

LORD WELLESLEY, DUDLEY AND WARD, PALMERSTON.

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by his majesty George III., who nominated him to the office of secretary of state for the foreign department, on the change of administration which ensued upon the death of the Duke of Portland. In the short period in which he remained in Spain, Lord Wellesley made great progress in the language; and though, like a nobleman who had been much longer in the country, Lord Heytesbury, he never ventured to negotiate or to write in Spanish; still he was an assiduous reader of Spanish literature, and communed with the poets and historians of Spain to the end of his days.

On Mr. Canning's second occupation of the foreign office it is unnecessary to remark. His friend and protegé, the accomplished Earl Dudley, subsequently ally, filled the post. Lord Dudley and Ward was a scholar and statesman in a large sense of the word, and though he wanted energy and vigour, still, in varied and general information, in neatness, clearness, point, and epigram, it was difficult in those days to find a man to match with him.

In 1830, the accomplished and able man who now presides at the foreign office, first occupied the important place of Her Majesty's principal secretary for foreign affairs. Long trained to public duties, Viscount Palmerston is not merely an able and excellent man of business, but a person of varied and general knowledge, an expert debater, and a luminous and eloquent speaker. He has, perhaps, more official and personal experience of men and things than any other living statesman, and must be a most invaluable official colleague. With most of the more important treaties of the last sixteen years his name is mixed up, and the provisions of public law to which he has bound his country, he has ever strictly, zealously, and to the letter fulfilled. As a negotiator he is clear-headed and dexterous, possessing, in the greatest degree, the suaviter in modo, but also the fortiter in re. We stop here, that we may not incur the suspicion of flattery. If Lord Palmerston were not in office, we might have spoken more freely.

His rival, Lord Aberdeen, the Peel foreign minister of 1834, and again of 1840, we have no desire to depreciate. He is a person of reading and research; cold, calm, collected, and somewhat supercilious, but withal of the most honourable character and the fairest intentions. But he is slow, solemn, pompous, and somewhat priggish; has taken little part in the domestic politics of the country, and is therefore unknown to,

Despatches and Correspondence of Marquess Wellesley, K.G. London, Murray, 1838.

and consequently no great favourite with the vast majority of Englishmen.

These men, able though they be, do not, with few exceptions, come up to the definition of great foreign statesmen. Bolingbroke and Gibbon might have been great negotiators, and great foreign ministers; so might probably Pitt and Fox; but Chesterfield was not only great as a diplomatist and negotiator, but great as a minister and as a speaker.

All that has been said of the chief and head of the foreign office applies, in a lesser degree, to those in the more responsible employments under that office. It is in the ability, skill, and safe conduct of agents,-whether those agents be ambassadors, ministers, plenipotentiaries, or simple envoys,-on which depends the success or the failure of the views and plans of the government at home. It is by the bearing and conduct of foreign agents abroad that the honour and dignity of the people and the sovereign whom they represent are upheld. The faults and follies of such men may irrevocably engage the country they represent in quarrels, wars, or false alliances. The errors of individuals at home are easily repaired and corrected, and the country stands uncommitted by them. But it is widely different in reference to exterior relations. An inconsiderate or hasty word even may wound a foreign country; a single false step, a single erroneous calculation, an incomplete combination, a slight and simple indiscretion, may compromise the dignity of one's own sovereign, the interests of one's own nation, and the reputation of the unlucky diplomatist. It is the more easy for the unfortunate diplomatist to commit himself, as he is often without guide and without instructions as there are neither laws, ordinances, nor rules, by which he may methodically trace out his conduct, or shape his language and his ideas. Often has he carte blanche before him; too often, to use the words of a British statesman, does his mind resemble a sheet of foolscap, and his success-if successful he be—is due to the boldness and quickness of his conceptions, to the fertility of his invention, to the particular turn of his mind and complexion of his character, to his learning, reading, experience, or perspicacity. Too rarely can the minister in a foreign court arrange his plans on anything like certain data. He is oftenest obliged to calculate merely on probabilities, and the slightest and most unforeseen incident sometimes deranges the most far-seeing and most deeply devised schemes of policy. If this faint sketch gives an outline of the tact and talent, the learning and experience, necessary in a minister for foreign affairs, it also affords the exact measure of the high importance of ambassadorial functions.