In the present dearth of stirring incident, the diurnal historians
have done their best to emphasize the ebullition of popular spleen at Tamworth. If any political significance could be attached to the riot, it would be as indicating that the Protectionists, who labour so hard to persuade the populace to accept them for their friends and patrons, appear to enjoy nearly as much favour with that class as the irhigs did when George Canning complimented tliem upon their mud and brickbat popularity. But the tumult . at Tamworth may with considerable probability be ascribed to sentiments in which politics had only a share. Tamworth was selected as the scene of a Protectionist demonstration simply be- cause it was the borough of the late Sir Robert Peel. Had the dinner gone off quietly, the crowing about reaction or the unpopu- larity of Free-trade would have been loud and endless. The con- nexion however, between Sir Robert Peel and the townsmen of Tamworth was of a more intimate and cordial nature than a mere political one. To hold a Protectionist meeting there, appeared, to the good folks only a little less insulting to his memory and the feelings of his family than it would have been to have held it in his drawingroom. One of the principal guests—the candidate-de- sipate for Cambridgeshire—was reported to have declared at Ips- wich, last week, that no " mawkish sensibility" would deter hum from expressing. the opinion, that " there never was a man who had occupied so important a part in the counsels of his country who had been throughout so insincere and disingenuous as Sir Robert Peel; and, so far from thinking it a public calamity that it had pleased Providence to remove him, he thought that, having in- flicted almost irreparable injury on his country, which, had ho been spared, he might have earned still further, it was a gracious dis- pensation that he had been removed." A few marks of disappro- bation elicited by this truculent language were borne down by the loud cheers of the meeting; and as a repetition of the offence was not unnaturally looked for at Tamworth, the outbreak of popular feeling, painful and blameable as all such aimless efferveseences are, was really no more than might have been expected.
