Lord Granville, the dangerous character of whose illness bad hardly
been made public, died on Tuesday, in the seventy-sixth year of his age, of the weakness caused by the opening of an abscess coming upon a constitution weakened by repeated attacks of gout. He bad held more Ministerial offices of different kinds than any other Minister, from that of Vice-President of the Board of Trade to Master of the Buckhounds, and from that of Foreign Minister and Colonial Minister, which he had held repeatedly, to that of President of the Council of Education. He had been leader of the House of Lords under all the recent Liberal Administra- tions, and was the leader of the Opposition in that House at the time of his death. He had a reputation for yieldingness which he hardly deserved. Lord Granville was really decisive and firm enough, hut he was deeply convinced that great States ought to be less tenaciously selfish in their policy than they usually are ; and that they ought not only to make amends when they are wrong, but should make conces- sions on matters of small moment, even when they believe themselves to be thoroughly right, rather than sacrifice the great interests involved in maintaining cordial rela- tions between the various States of the world. He was flexible, but not, what he has been termed, "supple," and from the moment when he entered the House of Commons as a strong Free-trader in 1837, often showed himself to be hard as steel against the public opinion of his class. In 1856, when he was sent to St. Petersburg to represent England at the coronation of Alexander II., he was on the point of returning home at an hour's notice, because the Czar had received him rudely, and was only diverted from his purpose by a prompt and ample apology. In a word, he was affable but resolute.
