at any time
were they in thought or feeling congenial.[229]

On the afternoon of the day following this debate, Peel was thrown from
his horse and received injuries from which he died three days later
(July 2), in the sixty-third year of his age, and after forty-one years
of parliamentary life. When the House met the next day, Hume, as one of
its oldest members, at once moved the adjournment, and it fell to Mr.
Gladstone to second him. He was content with a few words of sorrow and
with the quotation of Scott's moving lines to the memory of Pitt:--

'Now is the stately column broke,
The beacon-light is quench'd in smoke,
The trumpet's silver sound is still,
The warder silent on the hill!'

These beautiful words were addressed, said Mr. Gladstone, 'to a man
great indeed, but not greater than Sir Robert Peel.'

'Great as he was to the last,' wrote Mr. Gladstone in one of his notes
in 1851, 'I must consider the closing years of his life as beneath those
that had preceded them. His enormous energies were in truth so lavishly
spent upon the gigantic work of government, which he conducted after a
fashion quite different,--I mean as to the work done in the workshop of
his own brain,--from preceding and succeeding prime ministers, that
their root was enfeebled, though in its feebleness it had more strength
probably remaining than fell to the lot of any other public man.'

Peel may at least divide with Walpole the laurels of our greatest peace
minister to that date--the man who presided over beneficent and
necessary changes in national polity, that in hands less strong and less
skilful might easily have opened the sluices of civil confusion. And
when we think of Walpole's closing days, and of the melancholy end of
most other ruling spirits in our political history--of the
mortifications and disappointments in which, from Chatham and Pitt down
to Canning and O'Connell, they have quitted the glorious field--Peel
must seem happy in the manner and moment of his death. Daring and
prosperous legislative exploits had marked his path. His authority in
parliament never stood higher, his honour in the country never stood so
high. His last words had been a commanding appeal for temperance in
national action and language, a solemn plea for peace as the true aim to
set before a powerful people.

To his father Mr. Gladstone wrote:--

_July 2, 1850._--I thought Sir R. Peel looked extremely feeble
during the debate