Lord Stratford de Redcliffe died on Saturday, at the great
age of ninety-two. He was in his early politics a Peelite. His first great appointment on a special mission was the appoint- ment to St. Petersburg in 1824, before the accession of Nicholas. But when, some years later, the proposal was made to send him as permanent ambassador to St. Petersburg, the Czar resisted the suggestion, and sowed the seeds of the personal enmity which Sir Stratford Canning always felt and displayed towards him. He was not at Constantinople during the celebrated Menschikoff mission which led to the Crimean war, but it was his mind which ruled the crisis. No other Englishman ever exerted so much influence over Turkey, but even he wholly failed in the impossible task to induce Turkey to reform,—indeed, he gave it up, within two years of the close of the Crimean war. He was created a peer in 1852, and is the third great Canning whose name has become historical in the records of English public life.
