Grant, CHARLES, LORD GLENELG,

Grant, CHARLES, LORD GLENELG, son of Charles Grant, sometime M.P. for Inverness-shire, and a distinguished director of the East India Company, was born at Kidderpur, near Calcutta, in 1778. He was of the Grants of Sheuglie, cadets of the Grants of Grant. He was educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he took his degree of M.A. in 1804. In 1805 he published a poem on the Restoration of Learning in the East, which had won the university prize awarded by Dr Claudius Buchanan. He was called to the bar in 1807, but never practised. In 1811 he was elected M.P. for the Inverness district of burghs; and afterwards, succeeding his father in the county representation, continued in the House of Commons till 1835, when he was raised to the peerage. Grant held for five years the office of a Lord of the Treasury, and in 1819 was appointed Secretary for Ireland, which he continued to be for about two years. As Irish Secretary he endeavoured to suppress the Orange demonstrations, to secure the impartial administration of justice, and to devise a system of national education adapted for Catholics as well as Protestants. From 1823 to 1827 Grant was Vice-president of the Board of Trade; from 1830 to 1834 President of the Board of Control; and from 1834 to 1839 Secretary of State for the Colonies. After this he withdrew in a great measure from public affairs, but supported the Liberal party by his vote. He died at Cannes, in France, in 1866, unmarried. Lord Brougham pronounced Grant to be 'the purest statesman he had ever known.' He was an eloquent speaker, though, partly from diffidence and partly from indolence, he spoke but seldom. Some of his despatches as colonial secretary, on the rights of the natives in the colonies, on repressing idolatry, and abolishing slavery throughout the British possessions in South Africa, are models of elevated and just thought, and of fine impressive English.