ence to redress the balance of the Old;'
his son Charles, Earl Canning, first Viceroy of India; and his cousin,
Stratford Canning, Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe, who for a long term
of years sought to quicken into newness of social and political life the
broken and demoralised forces of the Ottoman Empire, and who practically
dictated from Constantinople the policy of England in the East. He was
born in 1786 and died in 1880. He entered the public service as a
_precis_-writer at the Foreign Office, and rose swiftly in the
profession of diplomacy. His acquaintance with Eastern affairs began in
1808, when he was appointed First Secretary to Sir Robert Adair, whom he
succeeded two years later at Constantinople as Minister Plenipotentiary.
The Treaty of Bucharest, which in 1812 brought the war, then in progress
between Russia and Turkey, to an end, was the first of a brilliant
series of diplomatic triumphs, which established his reputation in all
the Councils of Europe, and made him, in Lord Tennyson's words, 'The
voice of England in the East.' After services in Switzerland, in
Washington, and at the Congress of Vienna, Canning, in 1825, returned to
Constantinople with the rank of Ambassador.

He witnessed the overthrow of the Janissaries by Sultan Mahmoud II., and
had his own experience of Turkish atrocities in the massacre which
followed. He took a prominent part in the creation of the modern kingdom
of Greece, and resigned his appointment in 1828, because of a conflict
of opinion with Lord Aberdeen in the early stages of that movement.
Afterwards, he was gazetted Ambassador to St. Petersburg; but the
Emperor Nicholas, who by this time recognised the masterful qualities of
the man, refused to receive him--a conspicuous slight, which Lord
Stratford, who was as proud and irascible as the Czar, never forgave.
Between the years 1842 and 1858 he again filled his old position as
Ambassador to Constantinople, and during those years he won a unique
ascendency--unmatched in the history of diplomacy--over men and
movements in Turkey. He brought about many reforms, and made it his
special concern to watch over the interests of the Christian subjects at
the Porte, who styled him the 'Padishah of the Shah,' and that
title--Sultan of the Sultan--exactly hit off the authority which he
wielded, not always wisely, but always with good intent. It was an
unfortunate circumstance that Lord Stratford, after his resignation in
1852, should h