SPECTATOR'S LIBRARY.

Eloosarev.

Memoirs of the Right Honourable Sir Robert Peel. Bart., First Lord of her Majesty's Treasury. By the Author of " The Life of the Duke of Wellington." In two

volumes.. Newby.

TRAVELS.

Travels in Kashmir, Ladak, Iskardo. the Countries adjoining the Mountain-eonrse of the Indus, and the Himalaya North of the Punjab. With Map. engraved by direei ion of the Honourable East Duna Company, and other Illustrations. By G. T. Vigue. Esq., F.G.S., Author of A. Personal Narrative of a Visit to Ghusni.

Kabul. and Afghanistan." In two volumes. Cuiburs.

MEMOIRS OF SIR ROBERT PEEL.

THESE volumes are a catchpenny publication, got-up on the same principle that induces " ticketing-shops " to announce " Peel Prices." The shopkeepers, however, so far understand their cue as to confine their announcements to articles in the Tariff; but the compiler of the Memoirs of the Right Honourable Sir Robert Peel, in his eagerness for bookmaking by the readiest way, pounces upon any thing that will serve for stuffing. In 1810, Lord GRENVILLE was elected Chancellor of Oxford; and (quoted from the news- papers of the day) there is an account of the forms and festivities of the Installation, as it seems that young Mr. PEEL was present at the show. In 1811, the Mena and Wuxisiasort murders were perpetrated ; and the affair is duly chronicled, because a Com- mittee was appointed to inquire into "the state of the nightly watch," whence the future Home Secretary probably derived some of his ideas on the New Police. After the death of Mr. PER- CEVAL, the present Premier was advanced from the post of Under Colonial Secretary to the Irish Secretaryship ; and so the reader is presented with the particulars of Mr. PERCEVAL'S assassination. A full account is given of the visit of the Allied Sovereigns to this country in 1814; which has not the former remote relation to PEEL, for he never held an office connected with the exploits. of Continental armies. And so the thing goes on. As little per- ception of the true spirit of biography, or rather the same notions of the penny-a-liner, are visible in parts more closely connected with the public life of PEEL ;—which, by the by, consists of little more than a chronicle of his acceptance of or retirement from office, and quotations from the debates, garnished with remarks, ap- parently derived from the " usual channels of intelligence "whence the facts were taken. Sometimes PEEL'S own speeches are abridged, and those of other speakers exhibited ; and sometimes the merest trifles are chronicled at the expense of more important matters. The brawl between BROUGHAM and CANNING is narrated at large : the calm and measured way in which PEEL checked BROUGHAM .when he called him and his followers " parasites " of the Duke of WEL- LINGTON is omitted. No notice is taken of CoBsErr's attack upon Sir ROBERT when, after his Resolutions of censure upon PEEL'S Currency Bills were rejected, Lord ALTHORP made the " un- precedented " motion to exclude them from the minutes. The important refusal of Sir ROBERT to join WELLINGTON and LYND. BURST, in the interregnum of May 1832, to carry a "large mea- sure" of Representative Reform, is unmentioned ; and if the reader bad no other source of knowledge than this trumpery pub- lication, he would suppose the Income-tax was the only result of the present session. Of the Corn-law or the Tariff he would learn nothing beyond what he gathered from the Premier's speech in proposing the Income-tax. The same sort of carelessness, or rather of incapacity to distinguish between the unimportant and the essential, is visible in merely verbal matters. By some strange blunder, Sir ROBERT PEEL'S father is said to have been born in 1750, and his grandfather to have died in 1736; a prodigy more remarkable than any which attended the birth of Owen Glen- dower. Even in the compiler's motto, "Another of his fashion have they not

To lead their business,"

he must try to improve SHAKSPERE, who makes Iago say of Othello, "Another of his fathous have they not

To lead their business."

Of course the commentary upon the career or character of the subject of the biography requires no remark.

The life of a man published whilst he is living is seldom of much value, unless it be an autobiography ; and the career of Sir ROBERT PEEL has been so completely public, that, beyond a description of

his habits and peculiarities, there is perhaps little to tell which is not matter of Parliamentary record. A useful, and just now, probably, a valuable book, might be produced, containing only a judicious selection of his principal speeches linked together by connecting texts descriptive of any thing he said of lesser im- portance, or of any thing he did in the intervening periods. This would present a ready coup d'ceil of his public career, and furnish materials for an estimate of his public character up to the present period : neither of which points are very easily attainable by this publication, after any one has waded' through it. The useful facts it does contain may go into a very small compass.

The father of Sir ROBERT PEEL, as everybody knows, was ori-

ginally a small cotton-manufacturer ; who advanced himself by energy, industry, great business skill, and a pushing kind of worldly ability, to a baronetcy and enormous wealth,—leaving upwards of a million personal property, independent of real estate, and large sums given to his children during his life. The present Premier was born in 1788; and was educated at Harrow, and Oxford, where be obtained a double first-class degree, denoting the highest proficiency both in classics and mathematics. In 1809, he was elected, of course through his father's interest, Member for Cashel. At the open.

ing of the session in the following year he seconded the Ad- dress; and displayed such signs of ability in the course of the session that PERCEVAL appointed him Under Colonial Secretary ; an office which he held till the death of that Mi- nister, when he was advanced to the Irish Secretaryship, on the formation of Lord LIVERPOOL'S Government. In 1817, he was first elected for the University of Oxford ; and in 1818 he re- signed office,—escaping the responsibility of the Manchester mas- sacre and its accompaniments, though he continued generally to support the Government. In 1819, he was chosen Chairman of the Committee appointed to inquire into the state of the Bank of England with a view to the resumption of ,cash-payments • an in- quiry which ended in what is commonly called PEEL'S Currency Bill. In 1822, Lord SIDAIOUTII retired, and the Home Secretaryship with a seat in the Cabinet, was offered to PEEL by Lord LONDON- DERRY, who destroyed himself in that year. This offer he accepted ; and the reforms in the Criminal Law were the work of his second Official career. In 1827, he resigned, on the accession of CANNING to the Premiership : but resumed his old post in 1828,—to carry The Test Acts and Catholic Emancipation and to be again dis- placed in 1830 by the Reform Ministry ; after which, his course as leader of the Opposition, and Premier during a few months in 1834-5, are fresh in the minds of every one.

A survey of Sir ROBERT PEEL'S public life will not furnish an ex- ample of specific political consistency, even after every allowance is made for the transition state of the times in which we live. Upon the four great measures with which he was connected, he not merely changed his course, but turned right round. After supporting VANSITTART on the value of one-pound notes and guineas, he was a main instrument in placing the national currency on the ex- isting metallic basis : at the outset the leader of the Anti-Catholic party, when such opinions were no necessary part of Toryism, as witness Casrczazann, he finally carried Emancipation : for years connected with the Protestant or Orange Ascendancy, he has killed the snake that the Whigs could only scotch : and though supporting the Corn-laws at their origin, and throughout, PEEL, if he live, is the man who will finally remove them. Such conduct, of course, cannot be complimented with the praise of what is called " con- sistency" ; but, strictly considered, it rests upon an intelligible prin- ciple' —a principle which HUME first discovered when he affirmed that all government depended upon opinion, and BURKE was con- stantly enforcing, in his denial that political rights or privileges of any kind rested upon abstract laws, maintaining that they were things of "convention," of which the general advantage was the test:' Not embodying the principle in words, PEEL ever seems to have acted upon the idea, that few things in politics can be pro- nounced good or bad per se, but must derive their character from their operation on society ; an operation that will depend upon public opinion—upon the feelings they excite in and the views taken of them by the great bulk of the community possessing influence of any kind. We do not remember that be ever defended a thing esta- blished, or advocated a change, upon other grounds than its fitness to existing things : and there is little doubt that he has always had with him a powerful public opinion in the views he took. In this course there is none of the dignity of the philosopher, who, dis- covering truth, or what he deems truth, announces it without re- gard to temporary prejudices or opinions, in calm reliance upon its final triumph. As little is there of that mere truckling to passing notions which echoes whatever cry is uppermost ; or two-thirds of the candidates at an election would be other PEELS. The Premier is always a man of the time ; but to ascertain exactly what the time requires, and to see how do it, is a quality of no mean account in a Minister. Very few statesmen (excepting Ministers directing the operations of a war) have had the power or the disposition to pro- mulgate measures in disregard or greatly in advance of opinion, or which did not embody an old prejudice or a new truth that some dis- coverers had already inculcated. As it is, Sir ROBERT may yet find that his Income-tax has got somewhat in advance of the pa- tience of the age.

In glancing back upon the Premier's speeches as well as his ca- reer, there will be found more of dramatic consistency :

" Servetur ad imum Qualls ab incept° processerit, et sibi constet."

He was never vehement, never rash, never offensive, scarcely ever severe unless in reply to an attack : not speaking of things as "final," but on the contrary as measures that at some future period might hate to be carried; saying of Emancipation what he now says of the Corn-law, that if he thought it would accomplish what was promised for it, (tranquilize Ireland, &c.) he would con- cede it at once however opposed to his feelings. It is curious, too, to see how early the germs were developed of his oratorical style— the art of animating and dignifying truisms and commonplaces, which please the ear, and gratify the vulgar herd of auditors, both in the House and out of it, better than a severer style of eloquence. The peroration to his maiden speech on the Address, in 1809, is such as he might deliver now- " The Address," he said, "contained nothing that could prevent its unani- mous adoption. It called for no pledge to approve of what had passed, and im- posed no impediment in the way of inquiry. The aggression usurpation, and tyranny of Bonaparte, was a point on which all parties agreed. But to resist him effectually, they must be unanimous. Every heart and hand must be joined to give strength to the common cause." In the general qualities of hi a speeches, however, Sir ROBERT PEEL has greatly improved ; and by improvement we mean, in sub- stance as well as form. Lord Joust Ittissem, perhaps, and Lord PALMERSTON certainly, have improved ; but their improvement is that of workmen, not of Enlists. The fashion of the article may be better, and they show more skill in handling their tools ; but their metal is just the same—they are not richer in material. Sir ROBERT PEEL has perhaps improved little or nothing in mere neatness of composition, but there is more matter, with more close. Bess, cogency, and weight. As he advances in life his horizon expands—he sees more and he reasons more justly on what he sees : whereas it would not be difficult to point out certain Whig orators who are worse than the old Bourbons, for whilst they learn nothing they have forgotten a good deal. Still, all these qualities, conjoined with wonderful powers of ap- plication, a natural aptitude for affairs, and a long and large expe- rience of official business, would never have raised him to his pre- sent power and position—to his mastery, within rational limits of the Three Estates and the Country—for to that it comes. This unexampled position for a British Minister is (with the absence of competitors) traceable to his thorough appreciation of the Re- form Bill. Lord GREY and his coadjutors never seem to have understood their own creation. Because Mr. Gant in ninety- something advocated some such measure, he felt bound "in consist- ency" to bring forward the Reform Bill in 1831. • But there the Reform Ministry stopped. "The be-all and the end-all" of the revolution was merely that "his Majesty's Opposition" were in office. The election of a Tory Speaker, and the old "vigour beyond the law" of the Irish Coercion-bill, could have been effected easily enough in the old House, and were by no means the expected first fruits of Reform. The general business of Par- liament was carried on in the old spirit, but with less dexterity. Above all, the Ministry was fettered in every movement by failing to see that the Peers must be brought into harmony with the Com- mons as a condition necessary to Ministerial existence. For all practical purposes—for any improvement in the material comfort of the masses (witness the present distress)—and a removal of the various obstructions in law and commerce, which hampered the exertions or drained the purses of the middle classes—the country had been revolutionized in vain. The only two large measures that a Government could have met with any difficulty in carrying through the Boroughmongering Parliament, were the (questionable) Negro Emancipation and the English Corporation Bills ; though, 'looking at the influence of the Abolitionists and the increasing power of the pressure from without, even these exceptions may be doubted. This incapacity of comprehending the spirit of their own measure, rapidly destroyed the most powerful party that had ever assembled within the walls of Parliament. But the conduct of PEEL shows that he very soon appreciated the great change that bad taken place in the depositories of political power, and the consequent necessity that existed for a change in the conduct of political men. He took early opportunities of declaring that the Reform Bill was law, and must be submitted to fully and fairly—not "disturbed either by direct or insidious means." When office was prematurely forced upon him by WILLIAM the Fourth, he declared, in his Tamworth manifesto, that he would govern in the spirit of the Reform Bill, "if the spirit of the Reform Bill implies merely a careful review of institutions, civil and ecclesiastical, undertaken in a friendly tem- per, combining with the firm maintenance of established rights the correction of proved abuses and the redress of real grievances." On another occasion he warned his followers, that neither the Crown nor the House of Lords could stand long against the Com- mons—that the battle must be fought in the Registration Courts. And he had sagacity to see that the spirit and tone as well as the measures of the Conservative party (which he justly boasts of having founded) must partake of a more liberal cast, and reflect the general views and temper of the Registrating many, instead, as before, of the Borough-holding few. He has latterly been charged, both by Tories and Whigs, with having deceived his followers: but how deceived them. His speeches and votes have been constantly of a liberal kind : it was indeed a constant boast of the Whigs' that they had disunited him from his followers and broken up the Tory party; nay, so confident 'did they feel about this, that their Parlia- mentary orators twitted him with his want of power to carry on the Government, if he should ever get it : to which, on the morn- ing of the 1st February 1840, after giving a general account of his views, he made this reply- " 1 hav,e no such affection for office that I will consent to retain it, and be the instrument for effecting other men's opinions. My ambition is of another kind ; it is not for any personal object ; I want not office, I want not the dis- tinctions which office brings with it. I am content with the power which I exercise, and with the confidence which I enjoy ; and I never will consent to hold office upon any terms which I think dishonourable or inconsistent with the constitutional functions of a Minister ; nor will I consent to hold office if my own opinions are overruled, and those who are to be my supporters will lend me their adherence on no other terms than that I should conform to theirs. Whether these opinions are capable of being reduced to practice. I will not pretend to declare: they are not avowed for the purpose of conciliating such a degree of support as shall enable me to reduce them to practice. They are those on which I mean to act in office and out of office ; perfectly content to remain out of office when it shall be proved that they are impracticable— Times Report.

From the obvious advantages attending power, a politician is always obnoxious to suspicion, and when he enters young into public life, of perhaps unfair suspicion. HIPPOCRATES is lauded for changing his practice after experiment, and warning posterity against his mistakes : we compare Othello with Pericles of Tyre, and call it a wonderful improvement : but the statesman whom time and experience may have enabled to shake off the influence of family authority, collegiate education, the social atmosphere in which he lives, and perhaps the spell or the power of the superior Ministers over him, is decried as unprincipled or an apostate. Before the time of the Reform Bill, the facts of change in Sir Ro-

BERT PEEL are matter of record : men may differ in their explana- tion of the motives, or endeavour to defend them by the example of PITT, Fox, and others ; but there they stand. Taking the Re- form Bill as a new tem in political life, when another species of opinion began to obtain, when much of what was received before was to be discarded, and when Sir ROBERT PEEL individually was freed from the official superiority that formerly controlled him, we believe his steadiness and consistency will be found to be as great as any man's, and certainly far greater than that of his Whig detractors. Nor should his constancy, and its success, be forgotten in an estimate of his character." Magnz indolis signum est, sperare semper." When many of his party after the Reform Bill were prostrated, and some abandoned public life in despair, he, "bating no jot of heart or hope," struggled on at the head of a miserable minority of one to four, nor ceased his exertions till he had in- creased his ranks to a numerical equality with his opponents, and "the moral force" had departed from their numbers. He then gave the word for the onslaught ; and the army of the baffled and beaten Liberals was scattered to the elements, and no man can tell what will come out of the chaos.