e
Government will really and boldly take the Conservative side. On
the whole, perhaps, this bout may be deemed satisfactory.

February 14th, 1833 {p.354}

[Page Head: CHARACTER OF PEEL.]

The night before last Althorp brought forward his plan of Irish
Church Reform, with complete success. He did it well, and Stanley
made a very brilliant speech. The House received it with almost
unanimous applause, nobody opposing but Inglis and Goulburn, and
Peel, in a very feeble speech, which scarcely deserves the name
of opposition; it will be of great service to the Government.
O'Connell lauded the measure up to the skies; but Sheil said he
would bite his tongue off with vexation the next morning for
having done so, after he had slept upon it. It was clear that
Peel, who is courting the House, and exerting all his dexterity
to bring men's minds round to him, saw the stream was too strong
for him to go against it, so he made a sort of temporising,
moderate, unmeaning speech, which will give him time to determine
on his best course, and did not commit him. Poulett Thomson said
to me yesterday that Peel's prodigious superiority over everybody
in the House was so evident, his talent for debate and thorough
knowledge of Parliamentary tactics, gained by twenty years of
experience, so commanding, that he must draw men's minds to him,
and that he was evidently playing that game, throwing over the
ultra-Tories and ingratiating himself with the House and the
country. He, in fact, means to open a house to all comers, and
make himself necessary and indispensable. Under that placid
exterior he conceals, I believe, a boundless ambition, and hatred
and jealousy lurk under his professions of esteem and political
attachment. His is one of those contradictory characters,
containing in it so much of mixed good and evil, that it is
difficult to strike an accurate balance between the two, and the
acts of his political life are of a corresponding description, of
questionable utility and merit, though always marked by great
ability. It is very sure that he has been the instrument of great
good, or of enormous evil, and apparently more of the latter. He
came into life the child and champion of a political system which
has been for a long time crumbling to pieces; and if the perils
which are produced by its fall are great, they are mainly
attributable to the manner in which it was upheld by Peel, and to
his want of sagacity, in a wrong estimate of