The establishment of free and orthodox Greece as an independent State, under the protection of Great Britain, France, and Russia, was a conception of George Canning’s genius, and it received the sanction of the Duke of Wellington. After Canning’s death, his enemies made it a subject of reproach. It is said that, when his statue was erected in Palace Yard, a royal duke, walking beside it with the late Lord Eldon, began to pour out a diatribe of harmless accusations against the honoured dead, which he summed up, saying, “He caused the battle of Navarin, Eldon, and he was not nearly so big as that statue;” to which the great Lord Chancellor, whose patience had been long tried, expanded his bushy eyebrows, and exclaimed, “No, truly—nor so green:” the statue being then, as some of our readers may remember, more remarkable for the verdant colour of its patent verdigris than for its size. Whether the battle of Navarin was absolutely necessary to save Greece from Ibrahim Pasha and his Arabs, may still admit of dispute; but unquestionably it was the battle of Navarin which did save Greece. When, however, the business of selecting a king, and of organising the institutions of a central administration on monarchical principles came to be performed, the genius of Canning was represented by the torpor of Aberdeen, and the sagacity of Wellington by the belligerent amenity of Palmerston. The Russian sympathies of Capodistrias succeeded in delaying the final settlement of the Greek question, with the hope of placing Greece in a state of vassalage to the Czar. Lord Aberdeen combated the policy of the Corfiote feebly and unsuccessfully. He barely succeeded in preventing the execution of the Russian schemes, when the dagger of Mavromichalis opened the way for making Greece an independent kingdom by the assassination of Capodistrias.