Lord Stratford de Redeliffe. By A. L. Lee. (Nisbet and
Co.)— This "sketch," as it is styled on the title-page, is an abridg-
ment of Mr. Stanley Lane-Poole's "Life of Stratford Canning."
It appears opportunely. "Oh for an hour of Stratford Canning !" is an exclamation which must have risen to many lips of late
while we have been watching the long-drawn-out futilities of the "Concert of Europe." "He had to obtain the recall and punish- ment of two of the pashas from Asia, one of whom he described as the personification of cruelty, falsehood, and cowardice."
So writes the biographer, describing the multiplicity of pressing duties which fell upon the Ambassador at the beginning of the Crimean War. We can still procure the "recall" of these " per- sonifications," but their "punishment" consists in their trans- ference to some better post. Almost the first thing that Stratford Canning, then a young clerk in the Foreign Office, did was to
write a despatch at his cousin, George Canning's, dictation. More than seventy years after he was able to recall its language word for word.
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