low it, or
beside it. When, in the exultant consciousness of personal superiority,
as well as the strength of his cause, he trampled upon his opponents,
there was nothing coarse, nothing virulent, nothing contumelious,
nothing ungenerous in his triumph. Whether he addressed the Liverpool
electors, or the House of Commons, it was with the same ease, the same
adaptation to his auditory, the same unrivalled dexterity, the same
command of his subject and his hearers, and the same success. His only
faults as a speaker were committed when, under the inebriating influence
of popular applause, he was led away by the heat and passion of the
moment. A warm friend, a placable adversary, a scholar, a man of
letters, kind in his nature, affable in his manners, easy of access,
playful in conversation, delightful in society--rarely have the
brilliant promises of boyhood been so richly fulfilled as in Mr.
Canning.

_Political Economists_

Are the most daring of all legislators, just (it has been well said)
as "cockney equestrians are the most fearless of all riders." But the
confidence with which they propose their theories is less surprising
than the facility with which their propositions have been entertained,
and their extravagant pretensions admitted. We need not marvel at the
success of quackery in medicine and theology, when we look at the career
of the St. John Longs in political life. From the time in which the
bullion question came out of Pandora's Scotch mull, parliament has been
wearied with the interminable discussions which they have raised there.
Youths who were fresh from college, and men with or without education,
who were "in the wane of their wits and infancy of their discretion,"
imbibe the radiant darkness of Jeremy Bentham, and forthwith set
themselves up as the lights of their generation. No professors, even in
the subtlest ages of scholastic philosophy, were ever more successful
in muddying what they found clear, and perplexing what is in itself
intelligible. What are wages?--this, we are told, is the most difficult
and the most important of all the branches of political economy, and
this, we are also told, has been obscured by ambiguities and fallacies.
What is rent? What is value? Upon these questions, and such as these,
which no man of sincere understanding ever proposed to himself or
others, they discuss and dilate with as much ardour and to as little
effect, as the old philosophers disputed upon the elem