Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/211

 P A L P A L 193 In 1853 the artist was elected a member of the English Etching Club ; and his work with the needle is no less individual and poetic than his work with the brush. Mr Hamerton has pronounced him &quot;one of the few really great English etchers,&quot; &quot;one of the most accomplished etchers who ever lived.&quot; Considering his reputation and success in this department of art, his plates are few in number. They are executed with care and elaboration. Their virtues are not those of a rapid and vivid sketch, depending on force and selection of line, and adopting a frankly interpretative treatment ; they aim rather at truth and completeness of tonality, and embody many of the characteristics of other modes of engraving of mezzotint, of line, and of woodcut, lleadily accessible and .sufficiently representative plates may be studied in the Early Ploughman, in Etching and Etchers (1st ed.), and the Herdsman s Cottage, in the third edition of the same work. In 1861 Palmer removed to Keigate, where he spent an honoured and productive old age, till his death on the 24th of May 1881. One of his latest efforts was the production of a series of etchings to illustrate his English metrical version of Virgil s Eclogues, which was published in 1883, illustrated with reproductions of the artist s water-colours and with etchings, of which most were left unfinished at his ^death, and completed by his son, A. H. Palmer. A collection of Palmer s works was brought together by the Fine Arts Society in the year of his death. The descriptive and critical catalogue of this exhibition, and the memoir by his son, may be consulted for particulars of the painter s life and art. PALMERSTOX, HENRY JOHN TEMPLE, VISCOUNT, (1784-1865), statesman, minister of foreign affairs, and twice prime minister of England, was born at Broadlands, near Komsey, Hants, on the 20th October 1784. The Irish branch of the Temple family, from which Lord Palmerston descended, was very distantly related to the great English house of the same name, which played so conspicuous a part in the politics of the 18th century; but these Irish Temples were not without distinction. In the reign of Elizabeth they had furnished a secretary to Sir Philip Sidney and to Essex. In the reign of William and Mary Sir William Temple figured as one of the ablest diplomatists of the age. From his younger brother, who was speaker of the Irish House of Commons, Lord Palmerston descended ; the son of the speaker was created a peer of Ireland. March 12, 1722, and was succeeded by his grandson, the second viscount, who married a Miss Mee, a lady celebrated for her beauty, who became the mother of the subject of this notice. Lord and Lady Palmerston were persons of great taste and fashion, who travelled several times in Italy with their children. Their eldest son, Henry John, is mentioned by Lady Elliot in her correspondence as a boy of singular vivacity and energy. These qualities adhered to him through life, and he had scarcely left Harrow, at the age of eighteen, when the death of his father (April 17, 1802) raised him to the Irish peerage, and placed him at the head of his family. It was no doubt owing to his birth and con nexions, but still more to his own talents and character, that Lord Palmerston was thrown at a very early age into the full stream of political and official life. Before he was four-and twenty he had stood two contested elections for the university of Cambridge, at which he was defeated, and he entered parliament for a pocket-borough, Newtown, Isle of Wight, in June 1807. Through the interest of his guardians Lord Malmesbury and Lord Chichester, the duke of Portland made him one of the junior lords of the Admiralty on the formation of his administration in 1807. A few months later he delivered his maiden speech in the House of Commons in defence of the expedition against Copenhagen, which he conceived to be justified by the known designs of Napoleon on the Danish court. This speech was so successful that it marked him out as one of the rising statesmen of the day, in so much that, when Perceval formed his Government in 1809, he proposed to this young man of five and-twenty to take the chancellor ship of the exchequer, following apparently the examples of Pitt and Lord Henry Petty, who had filled that office at about the same age. Lord Palmerston, however, though extremely surprised and flattered by the proposal, had the wisdom to refuse it, on the ground that he was totally ignorant of finance, and had only once addressed the House of Commons. Nor did he allow the offer of a seat in the cabinet to break his modest resolution. He con tented himself with the far less important office of secre tary at war, charged exclusively with the financial business of the army, without a seat in the cabinet, and in this position he remained, singularly enough, without any signs of an ambitious temperament or of great political abilities, for twenty years (1809-1828). His administrative talents were confined within the limits of the War Office, which he kept in perfect order, and his parliamentary speeches to the annual statements in which he moved the army estimates of those eventful years. During the whole of that period Lord Palmerston was chiefly known as a man of fashion, and a subordinate minister without influence on the general policy of the cabinets he served. Some of the most humorous poetical pieces in the Nciv Whig Guide were from his pen, and he was entirely devoted, like his friends Peel and Croker, to the Tory party of that day. The political opinions of Lord Palmerston at that time, and perhaps through life, were those of the school of Pitt not the effete Toryism of the Pitt clubs, which he always treated with disdain, but the enlarged Conserva tive views of the great minister himself, as represented after Pitt s death by Canning. Lord Palmerston never was a Whig, still less a Ptadical ; he was a statesman of the old English aristocratic type, liberal in his sentiments, favourable to the cause of justice and the march of pro gress, but entirely opposed to the claims of democratic government. Thus he supported from the first the cause of Catholic emancipation, and he sympathized warmly with the constitutional party throughout the world, but he was opposed to the extension of the franchise in England, and he regarded the impulse of popular power as a force to be directed and controlled rather than obeyed. So successfully did he practise the art of governing a free people that he lived to be regarded as a popular minister, though he had been for twenty years a member of a Tory Government, and never materially altered his own opinions. In the later years of Lord Liverpool s administration, after the death of Lord Londonderry in 1822, strong dissen sions existed in the cabinet. The Liberal section of the Government was gaining ground. Canning became foreign minister and leader of the House of Commons. Huskisson began to advocate and apply the doctrines of free trade. Catholic emancipation was made an open question. Although Lord Palmerston was not in the cabinet, he cordially supported the measures of Canning and his friends. Upon the death of Lord Liverpool, Canning was called to the head of affairs ; the Tories, including Peel, withdrew their support, and an alliance was formed between the Liberal members of the late ministry and the Whigs. In this combination the chancellorship of the exchequer was first offered to Lord Palmerston, who accepted it, but this appointment was frustrated by the king s intrigue with Herries, and Palmerston was content to remain secretary at war with a seat in the cabinet, which he now entered for the first time. The Canning administration ended in four months by the death of its XVIII. --25