t of political expediency. He passed bills,
not because truth, freedom, and justice demanded them, but because they
promoted the interests of party, or, it might be, because he thought it
was expedient for the national interests at the time that they should
be passed. Even the great measure of the repeal of the corn laws he
retarded longer than any other man could have retarded it. He was the
minister who passed it, and who hindered it from passing sooner.
His whole political history was a confession of political error, and
repentance. Yet he did not leave the honour of carrying out their own
measures to men who had formed a public opinion concerning them, and who
could with conscience and honour have conducted them through parliament;
he refused them all aid in each efforts, and when his time arrived,
seized the schemes and carried them, demanding the homage of the
Conservatives for conceding so little to the people, and the homage
of the people for conceding to them so much more than they could have
obtained from anybody else.

The personal history of this eminent man contained little that was
striking; a cold prudence preserved him from engaging in and personal
matters that could make his life eventful. He was born in the year 1788,
in a cottage near Bury, in Lancashire, where his father then lived in
humble circumstances. Mr. Peel founded in that neighbourhood works for
calico-printing, and laid by that means the foundation of a very great
fortune. He was afterwards knighted, and having written a pamphlet
entitled, "The National Debt a Source of National Prosperity," he was
frequently consulted by Mr. Pitt, and it is alleged, conceived the idea
that his son might become Mr. Pitt's successor. He sent young Robert
to Harrow at an early age, where he was on the same form with Byron the
poet, who thus recorded his impressions of him: "There were great hopes
of Peel among us all, masters and scholars. As a scholar he was greatly
my superior; as a schoolboy out of school I was always in scrapes, he
never; and in school he always knew the lesson, and I rarely." "The
boy was father to the man" in both these cases, for Peel through life
maintained the same cautious, industrious, and circumspect habits, which
certainly never characterised his far greater schoolfellow. He left
Harrow for Oxford, where he especially distinguished himself as a
classic. In 1809 he became of age, and entered parliament for a rotten
borough openly