Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/467

 1920 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 459 office before 1830 was limited to his two posts in the ministry of * All the Talents ', in which he succeeded Fox at the foreign office, and Mr. Tre velyan's remark that Grenville's influence may be discerned in the tone of his dispatches is interesting. Some judicious comments, too, are made on his refusals to take office in 1809, 1811, and 1812. It was, as is noted here, fortunate that he was not in power during the later years of the Napoleonic war ; he was ignorant of military affairs, and was timid and despondent where they were concerned. He held that the war in the Peninsula would prove useless ; only a few days before Leipzig he wished that the allies would make a moderate peace, and on Napoleon's return from Elba he argued in parliament that we had no right ' personally to proscribe the present ruler of France '. After Fox's death he was the acknowledged leader of the whigs, but for twenty years his leadership was little more than nominal. In the upper house, which he entered on his father's death in 1807, he was in a less congenial atmosphere than in the lower, where his oratory and his manners had made him popular, and this increased his inactivity, while his lofty temperament kept him aloof from the squabbles of his party. He had reason for depression : reform, the cause he had at heart, seemed hopeless, and he would make no effort to obtain it, for he loathed the noisy radicals who were demanding it, and considered their programme subversive of the constitution and their methods politically mischievous. On the other hand, the radicals bitterly reproached him as a traitor to the cause. In a clear and forcibly written account of party politics from 1827 to Grey's accession to office, Mr. Trevelyan observes that the division of the whigs consequent on Canning's overtures was a punishment for their inaction. Profoundly distrusting and disliking Canning, Grey found himself separated from most of his old friends, and grieved over their desertion as fatal to the party. The future proved widely different from his fears. The duke of Wellington rid himself of the Canningites and divided the old tory phalanx by catholic emancipation, and in 1830 Grey resumed the active leadership of a reintegrated party on the election of Althorp, of whose character we have a just appreciation, as its leader in the commons. When he succeeded the duke as prime minister he was satisfied that the time had at last come for which he had waited so long, sometimes in hope and sometimes almost in despair. A complete history of the great struggle for reform has lately been given us by Mr. J. R. M. Butler, and its salient points are briefly and skilfully narrated here with the slight difference in treatment appropriate to a biography. The struggle brought out qualities in Grey in many respects widely different from those he had previously exhibited. His youthful impetuosity had long vanished, and he now showed himself deliberate in word and action. His haughtiness was replaced by an extraordinary tactfulness in dealing with men, and especially with the king, and by a willingness to give full consideration to the opinions of others, and, if he became convinced that they were sounder than his own, to adopt them. This gave rise to the idea that he was ' easily led ', though no pressure could make him yield when he saw clearly that he was right on a point of vital importance, as on the question of demanding a creation of peers before the second reading in the lords of the bill of 1832.