ance and rescue, assisted by speech and vote to disallow the most objectionable of the peers' amendments; and Lord Lyndhurst was obliged-for 'the duke,' as usual, ranged himself on the side of Peel-to reluctantly acquiesce in the restoration of the bill to something like its former state, and the measure as it now exists passed. The eager ultra men of the party were greatly exasperated, and denounced in unmeasured terms the treacherous conduct, as they termed it, of their great but unmanageable leader. That'Peel had no pluck' became a received and favourite phrase with them, and but for a haunting consciousness that they were powerless without him, he would unquestionably have been deposed. As it was, they sullenly acquiesced; and the continued vacillations, the infirm and abortive purposes of the cabinet-the constantly failing revenue, vainly propped by an increase of Excise taxes, and other clumsy and ineffective expedientsrevived their hopes of ultimate triumph, and with the increasing hostility of Sir Robert Peel's parliamentary tone and action, reconciled them somewhat to his previous moderation and forbearance. The famous 'ladies-ofthe-bedchamber' interlude took place during this period, in which the only party that appears to have acted with perfect dignity and good sense was the Queen herself. The cabinet, on being thrown into a virtual minority on the Jamaica Constitution-Suspension Act, withdrew, the male portion of them, from her majesty's service, leaving, as Lord Brougham humorously expressed it, their better halves behind them; and Sir Robert Peel, with sufficient adroitness, caught at the circumstance to relieve himself from the acceptance of office at an inopportune moment. His time was not yet come; and perhaps no man has ever displayed more sagacity than the right honourable baronet in seizing upon the right hour for the right work. The reinstated ministry staggered on as well as they could till 1841, when, alarmed at the deficiency of the revenue to meet the expenditure, they hastily caught up, as a last resource, an eight-shilling fixed duty on corn, and proposed it to parliament in lieu of the sliding-scale; hinting at the same time very intelligibly, that if parliament raised the duty to ten or twelve shillings, they would acquiesce, and resign themselves to continuance in office. This proposal obtained neither the confidence nor the support of the Free-trade party, and Sir Robert met it by a motion of want of confidence in ministers, which was carried by a majority of one! Parliament was dissolved, and in the new House of Commons the want-ofconfidence motion, renewed as an amendment to the address in reply to the speech from the throne, was carried by a majority of ninety-one.

Sir Robert having thus, and greatly by the aid of the agricultural party, stormed office, was immediately invested by the Queen with the direction of affairs. His cabinet was strengthened by the accession of the some time Whigs, Lord Stanley and Sir James Graham, and a more powerful ministry, in a parliamentary and party sense, never perhaps existed in the country. The new premier succeeded to office at a critical and disastrous time. The revenue was several millions below the expenditure: two bad harvests in succession, with other concurrent causes, had produced appalling distress in the manufacturing districts: the most frightful destitution prevailed in Paisley, Glasgow, Manchester, and other centres of trade. Foreign affairs wore an equally gloomy aspect. France, exasperated, alienated by the vigorous and successful expedition against Mehemet Ali, expressed both in

the Chambers and the press the bitterest hostility towards this country; the American Maine boundary dispute was ripening rapidly into an open quarrel; the Chinese war was apparently as far as ever from a termination; and, to crown all, news not very long afterwards arrived of the military disasters in Affghanistan! Sir Robert Peel faced these difficulties with energy and resolution, though keenly sensible of their magnitude and weight. 'What have you done with the revenue I left you?' exclaimed the premier, addressing the late ministers, who objected to the Income Tax, by which he proposed to meet his financial embarrassments. In the year 1835 you, the ministry, found the affairs of the two great empires in this state:-In the United Kingdom the surplus of income over expenditure was £1,376,000; in India, £1,556,000. You had then a nett surplus approaching to three millions! How have you left matters? You say I overstate the difficulties. Can you deny that you found a surplus of three millions, and have left a deficiency of five millions? On the 5th of April 1842, the deficit of the revenue of the United Kingdom, compared with its expenditure, was £2,570,000; of India, £2,430,000. The difference then against this country and its credit is eight millions as compared with 1835!'

Although Sir Robert Peel had offered the best defence of a sliding scale of corn duties of which it is susceptible, he did not, it was early apparent, enjoy the entire confidence of the chiefs of the Protectionist party. They appear to have felt a lurking suspicion that a man of Sir Robert Peel's sagacity could not for ever continue blind to the injustice of taxing one class, and that the most numerous and most helpless in the community, for the support of another class; and they knew by repeated example, that, once convinced he had been in error, no consideration on earth would induce him to forbear acting upon that conviction! The Duke of Richmond declared, immediately after the result of the elections was known, that if the minister did not please the agricultural members, they, by whose aid he would be placed in office, would turn him out again. To this taunt Sir Robert quietly replied, that he should take office to give effect not to the opinions of others, but to his own. His first reformation of the sliding-scale confirmed the suspicions entertained by the Protectionist party, and his Grace of Buckingham openly refused to disgrace himself by an alliance with so dangerous and deceptive a minister. Indeed it was soon evident to all men not wilfully blind, that the tendency of the ministerial policy, quickened doubtless by the rapid development of the AntiCorn-Law League, was towards an abolition of the taxes on food. The ministry from the first was one of progress-slow perhaps, but marked and determined in its direction; and if it be objected that the prosecution of Mr O'Connell was harsh or unnecessary, it cannot be denied that Sir Robert Peel manifested by his Maynooth grant, about which such a hubbub was raised, a strong desire to conciliate the Catholic population of Ireland. At length, towards the close of 1845, immediately after the failure of the potato-crop had been ascertained, the astounding announcement appeared in the 'Times' newspaper that the Conservative cabinet had determined on abolishing the corn-duties-on capitulating, as Protectionist writers termed it, with the Anti-Corn-Law confederacy. This news, partially disbelieved at first, was afterwards confirmed, but only as far as the Prime Minister and a majority of the cabinet were concerned; for the Duke of Wellington and

Lord Stanley having refused their consent to the proposition, Sir Robert Peel tendered the collective resignation of the cabinet, which her Majesty, on the 6th of December, reluctantly accepted. There can be no doubt entertained that Sir Robert Peel was anxiously desirous that the repeal of the corn duties should be effected by his political opponents, who, by the voices of Lords John Russell and Morpeth had announced their conversion to the doctrine and necessity of total repeal two or three weeks previously; but again, as in 1829, he was doomed to the task of reversing the policy of his party, and for the same reason-that no other man than himself could be found capable of reversing it.

Lord John Russell, earnestly supported by her Majesty, attempted to form a ministry; but after consulting with his proposed colleagues, and carefully surveying the situation, abandoned the effort in despair, thus virtually confessing himself unequal to the task of repealing the obnoxious laws, even with the cordial assistance of Sir Robert Peel out of office. The right honourable baronet was immediately resummoned to the royal councils, and his powerful and ever-faithful friend at a pinch, the Duke of Wellington, who could alone enable him to o'erleap the barrier of the House of Lords, having returned to his aid, Sir Robert, confident of success, again threw all personal motives, all personal ties, all considerations of power, office, patronage, to the winds, in order to carry a measure which time and circumstance had convinced him was essential to the permanent welfare of the country. The Duke of Wellington, who must be held to be as good a judge of what constitutes personal honour as most men, expressed himself in his explanatory speech delighted with his right honourable friend' for resuming office under such circumstances, and avowed his determination to support him by every means at his command the other members of the administration concurred in the duke's opinion and resolve, with the exception of Lord Stanley, who went into opposition; and the minister met parliament at the head of a united cabinet with his corn-law repeal measures ready in his hand. It has been said of Burke with partial truth

'that he narrowed his mind,

And to party gave up what was meant for mankind.'

The precise converse of this proposition is true of the late Sir Robert Peel. It is manifestly absurd to deny the purity and disinterestedness of his motives in thus acting, and the reasonable solution of his conduct is this that, unlike gentlemen whose youthful illumination of intellect enables them to discern accurately, and to decide justly, every incident and experience of the longest life, Sir Robert Peel grew wiser as he grew older in other words, that knowledge with him was not intuitive and spontaneous, but the result of observation and experience. All men are not gifted with á priori intellects; and Sir Robert appears in this respect to have been less fortunately gifted than such gentlemen as the honourable member for Lincoln, whose gray hairs seem to cover the precisely same amount of wisdom as the curly locks of their boyhood; whose motto, like that of the Latin Church, is semper idem; and who pridefully acknowledge with the returned French emigrés, qu'ils n'ont rien oublié, ni rien appris ' -have neither forgotten nor learned anything.

'Power,' said Sir Robert Peel in defending his change of opinion on the Corn Laws-power to effect great objects is really valuable; but for my part I can say with perfect truth, that even for those objects I do not covet it. Still I am ready to incur its responsibilities, to bear its sacrifices, to affront its perils; but I will not retain it with mutilated power and shackled authority. I will not stand at the helm during dark and tempestuous weather, if that helm is not allowed to freely traverse; and I will not undertake to direct the course of the vessel now by observations taken in 1842.' He thus addressed himself to the taunt of inconsistency -'I will not withhold the homage due to the progress of reason, and to truth, by denying that my opinions on the subject of Protection have undergone a change. It may be supposed that there is something humiliating in making such an admission. Sir, I feel no such humiliation; but I should feel the deepest humiliation if, having changed or modified my opinions, I declined to acknowledge the change for the base fear of encountering the charge of inconsistency.' Parliament deferred to the advice of the minister; and after a protracted struggle of nearly six months' duration, the commercial measures of the cabinet were carried through both Houses of Parliament by large majorities, and received the cheerful and personally-given assent of the sovereign. Sir Robert Peel, as he had always anticipated, was overthrown by a division of the House upon the Irish Arms Bill,' in which Liberals, Whigs, and Protectionists, united to deprive him of power. It was a curious circumstance that the corn-duties repeal bill finally passed the Lords on the same evening, the arrival of the masters in Chancery to make the announcement to the Commons having interrupted Mr Charles Buller's speech upon the Irish Bill. As soon as the vociferous cheers of the members greeting the consummation of the minister's crowning triumph had died away, the honourable gentleman continued his speech, and the House a few hours afterwards expelled that minister from power! Ibrahim Pacha was present under the gallery, and must have been sadly puzzled, one would think, to reconcile the congratulatory cheers with the vindictive division !

It was during this debate that Mr D'Israeli, after reciting a more than ordinary number of carefully-arranged sneers and sarcasms-impromptus made at leisure-relative to Sir Robert Peel's deficiency, not only in moral, but intellectual qualities-an accusation, by the way, which excited far more general and derisive laughter without than party cheers within the House-again alluded to the charge respecting Mr Canning, who, according to the honourable member, was an eagle,' whilst Sir Robert Peel was only ‘a vulture;' and Mr Canning, moreover, 'rode the Commons as Alexander did his horse Bucephalus, both, in the days of Gatton and Old Sarum, when the pulse of England beat higher than it does now, worthy of each other!' The peroration of the present leader of the gentlemen of England suggested, as the best excuse doubtless that could be given for the coming vote on the Arms Bill, that it had been brought about by a general desire amongst honourable gentlemen of all parties, to avenge the very mild opposition which Sir Robert Peel, following longo intervallo in the wake of the Duke of Newcastle and Earl Grey, offered to Mr Canning's administration. 'He must feel,' said the honourable member' he must feel that it is a Nemesis that dictates this vote and regulates this decision,

and that is about to stamp with its seal the catastrophe of a sinister career.'

The value of this diatribe can be best estimated by those who remember the speeches of Mr D'Israeli in 1841-fourteen years after Mr Canning had been hunted' to death. The honourable gentleman at that time complimented Sir Robert Peel, that, placed in an age of rapid civilisation and rapid transition, he had adapted the practical character of his measures to the condition of the times;' and he emphatically remarked, that Sir Robert' was indeed a great man, who had never employed his influence for factious purposes, never been stimulated in his exertions by a disordered desire of obtaining office, and he (Mr D'Israeli) looked anxiously forward to the time when the right honourable baronet would have an opportunity of establishing a government which would have the confidence of the education, the property, and, as he thoroughly believed, of the great body of the nation.' What can one say after this, except to repeat the opinion expressed by Lord Chancellor Eldon, in one of the letters already quoted the devil of it, there is no consistency in anybody'-not even in

Mr D'Israeli !

On the 30th of June 1846 Sir Robert Peel resigned the power which he had wielded to such important, and, in the opinion of the vast majority of the nation, to such magnificent results. Never had he appeared so great and puissant as when casting off power-never half so formidable in the hour of triumph as in that of apparent defeat. The robes of office cast aside, he seemed to dilate in unfettered pride and strength. During the speech in which he recounted the achievements of his great administrationthe flourishing state of the revenue-restored amity with France-the successful conclusion of the Chinese war-the triumphant effacement of the reverses in India-the honourable settlement of the Oregon dispute, of which the official announcement had that day reached him from Mr Pakenham, as if to gild his fall with superadded glory-the reduction he had effected on the interest of a considerable portion of the National Debt-the success of his financial measures generally-and finally, and above all, the erasure from the statute book of the obnoxious Corn Laws-a more than Roman triumph seemed to pass before the eyes of his entranced and admiring auditory. The commanding tone was that of a conqueror rather than that of a minister whose staff of office had just been broken in his grasp, as he not only pointed with pardonable exultation to the triumphs of the past, but traced with victorious, authoritative finger the course which his successors must pursue, so firmly and irrevocably had he launched the vessel of the state in the track which common sense, enlightened philosophy, and generous patriotism had pointed out.

Yet in this moment of triumphant laying down of office, Sir Robert Peel cheerfully and thoroughly recognised the claims of the men who had borne the heat and burthen of the day, and marshalled and disciplined the forces which, his great claim to honour, he had led to victory-a victory which, but for him, must have been indefinitely postponed. The name,' said he, 'which ought to be, and which will be associated with these measures, is not mine, nor that of Lord John Russell: it is that of a man who, acting, as I believe, from pure and disinterested motives, and with untiring energy,