Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 4.djvu/68

58 his while to challenge the hatred of a people whose future he, unlike his colleague Perceval, had imagination enough to foresee. George Canning was thirty-seven years old when he took charge of the Foreign office. His father, who came from a very respectable but in no way eminent family, died in 1771; his mother having no means of support became a provincial actress, and the boy was adopted by an uncle, who sent him to Eton and Oxford. He left Oxford at the time when the French Revolution promised a new birth to Europe, and Canning was then a warm Republican from sympathy and conviction. The political reaction which followed swept the young man to the opposite extreme; and his vehemence for monarchy and the Tories gave point to a Whig sarcasm,—that men had often been known to turn their coats, but this was the first time that a boy had turned his jacket. In consequence of his conversion Pitt brought him into Parliament in 1793, and placed him in office in 1796. In the hotbed of Pitt's personal favor Canning's natural faults were stimulated, until the irritation caused by his sarcastic wit and by what the stolid gentry thought his flippancy roused a sort of insurrection against him. Few men were more admired, and none was more feared or hated; for it was impossible to say what time-honored monument he might overthrow in defending.

No man in England flung himself more violently