An occupied man of business, he was converted when other men of business in the nation were converted.

It is not, however, to be denied, that a calm and bland nature like that of Peel is peculiarly prone to self-illusion. Many fancy that it is passionate imaginative men who most deceive themselves; and of course they are more tempted,-a more vivid fancy and a more powerful impulse hurry them away. But they know their own weakness. "Do you believe in ghosts, Mr. Coleridge?" asked some lady. "No, ma'am, I have seen too many," was the answer. A quiet calm nature, when it is tempted by its own wishes, is hardly conscious that it is tempted. These wishes are so gentle, quiet, as it would say, so "reasonable," that it does not conceive it possible to be hurried away into error by them. Nor is there any hurry. They operate quietly, gently, and constantly. Such a man will very much believe what he wishes. Many an imaginative outcast, whom no man would trust with sixpence, really forms his opinions on points which interest him by a much more intellectual process-at least has more purely intellectual opinions beaten and tortured into himthan the eminent and respected man of business, in whom every one confides, who is considered a model of dry judgment, of clear and passionless equanimity. Doubtless Sir Robert Peel went on believing in the corn-laws when no one in the distrusted classes even fancied that they were credible.

It has been bitterly observed of Sir Robert Peel, that he was "a Radical at heart;" and, perhaps with a similar thought in his mind, Mr. Cobden said once, at a League meeting, "I do not altogether like to give up Peel. You see he is a Lancashire man." And it cannot be questioned that, strongly opposed as Sir Robert Peel was to the Reform Bill, he was really much more suited to the reformed than to the unreformed House of Commons. The style of debating in the latter was described by one who had much opportunity for observation, Sir James Mackintosh, as "continuous animated after-dinner discussion." The House was composed mainly of men trained in two great schools, on a peculiar mode of education, with no great real knowledge of the classics, but with many lines of Virgil and Horace lingering in fading memories, contrasting oddly with the sums and business with which they were necessarily brought side by side. These gentlemen wanted not to be instructed, but to be amused; and hence arose what, from the circumstance of their calling, may be called the class of conversationalist statesmen. Mr. Canning was the type of these. He was a man of elegant gifts, of easy fluency, capable of embellishing any thing, with a nice wit, gliding swiftly over the most delicate topics; passing from topic to topic like the raconteur of the dinner-table, touching easily on

them all, letting them all go as easily; confusing you as to whether he knows nothing, or knows every thing. The peculiar irritation which Mr. Canning excited through life was at least in part owing to the natural wrath with which you hear the changing talk of the practised talker running away about all the universe; never saying any thing which indicates real knowledge, never saying any thing which at the very moment can be shown to be a blunder; ever on the surface, and ever ingratiating itself with the superficial. When Mr. Canning was alive, sound men of all political persuasions-the Duke of Wellington, Lord Grey-ever disliked him. You may hear old Liberals to this day declaring he was the greatest charlatan who ever lived, angry to imagine that his very ghost exists; and when you read his speeches yourself, you are at once conscious of a certain dexterous insincerity which scems to lurk in the very felicities of expression, and to be made finer with the very refinements of the phraseology. Like the professional converser, he seems so apt at the finesse of expression, so prone to modulate his words, that you cannot imagine him putting his fine mind to tough thinking, really working, actually grappling with the rough substance of a great subject. Of course, if this were the place for an estimate of Mr. Canning, there would be some limitation, and much excuse to be offered for all this. He was early thrown into what we may call an aristocratic debating society, accustomed to be charmed, delighting in classic gladiatorship. To expect a great speculator, or a principled statesman, from such a position, would be expecting German from a Parisian, or plainness from a diplomatist. He grew on the soil on which he had been cast; and it is hard, perhaps impossible, to separate the faults which are due to it and to him. He and it have both passed away. The old delicate parliament is gone, and the gladiatorship which it loved. The progress of things, and the Reform Bill which was the result of that progress, have taken, and are taking, the national representation away from the university classes, and conferring it on the practical classes. Exposition, arithmetic, detail, reforms,-these are the staple of our modern eloquence. The old boroughs which introduced the young scholars are passed away; and even if the young scholars were in parliament, the subjects do not need the classic tact of expression. Very plain speaking suits the "passing tolls," "registration of joint-stock companies," finance, the Post-office. The petty regulation of the details of civilisation, which happily is the daily task of our government, does not need, does not suit, a recherché taste or an ornate eloquence. As is the speech, so are the men. Sir Robert Peel was inferior to Canning in the old parliament; he would have been infinitely superior to him in the new. The aristocratic refinement, the nice embellish

ment, of the old time, were as alien to him as the detail and dryness of the new era were suitable. He was admirably fitted to be where the Reform Bill placed him. He was fitted to work and explain; he was not able to charm or to amuse.

In its exact form this kind of eloquence and statesmanship is peculiar to modern times, and even to this age. In ancient times the existence of slavery forbade the existence of a middleclass eloquence. The Cleon who possessed the tone and the confidence of the people in trade was a man vulgar, coarse, speaking the sentiments of a class whose views were narrow and whose words were mean. So many occupations were confined to slaves, that there was scarcely an opening for the sensible, moderate, rational body whom we now see. It was, of course, always possible to express the sentiments and prejudices of people in trade. It is new to this era, it seems created for Sir Robert Peel to express those sentiments, in a style refined, but not too refined; which will not jar people of high cultivation, which will seem suitable to men of common cares and important transactions.

In another respect Sir Robert Peel was a fortunate man. The principal measures required in his age were "repeals." From changing circumstances, the old legislation would no longer suit a changed community; and there was a clamour first for the repeal of one important act, and then of another. This was suitable to the genius of Peel. He could hardly have created any thing. His intellect, admirable in administrative routine, endlessly fertile in suggestions of detail, was not of the class which creates, or which readily even believes an absolutely new idea. As has been so often said, he typified the practical intelligence of his time. He was prone, as has been explained, to receive the daily deposits of insensibly-changing opinion; but he could bear nothing startling; nothing bold, original, single, is to be found in his acts or his words. Nothing could be so suitable to such a mind as a conviction that an existing law was wrong. The successive gradations of opinion pointed to a clear and absolute result. When it was a question, as in the case of the Reform Bill, not of simple abolition, but of extensive and difficult reconstruction, he "could not see his way." He could be convinced that the anti-Catholic laws were wrong, that the currency laws were wrong, that the commercial laws were wrong; especially he could be convinced that the laissez-faire system was right, and the real thing was to do nothing; but he was incapable of the larger and higher political construction. A more imaginative genius is necessary to deal with the consequences of new creations, and the structure of an unseen future.

This remark requires one limitation. A great deal of what is called legislation is really administrative regulation. It does

not settle what is to be done, but how it is to be done; it does not prescribe what our institutions shall be, but directs in what manner existing institutions shall work and operate. Of this portion of legislation Sir Robert Peel was an admirable master. Few men have fitted administrative regulations with so nice an adjustment to a prescribed end. The Currency Act of 1814 was an instance of this. If you consult the speeches by which that bill was introduced and explained to parliament, you certainly will not find any very rigid demonstrations of political economy, or dry compactness of abstract principle. Whether the abstract theory of the supporters of that act be sound or unsound, no exposition of it ever came from the lips of Peel. He assumed the results of that theory; but no man saw more quickly the nature of the administrative machinery which was required. The separations of the departments of the Bank of England, the limitation of the country issues, though neither of them original ideas of Sir Robert's own mind, yet were not, like most of his other important political acts, forced on him from without. There was a general agreement among the received authorities in favour of a certain currency theory; the administrative statesman saw much before most men what was the most judicious and effectual way of setting it at work and regulating its action.

We have only spoken of Sir Robert Peel as a public man; and if you wish to write what is characteristic about him, that is the way to do so. He was a man whom it requires an effort to think of, as engaged in any thing but political business. Disraeli tells us that some one said that Peel was never happy except in the House of Commons, or doing something which had some relation to something to be done there. In common life we continually see some men as it were scarcely separable from their pursuits: they are as good as others, but their visible nature seems almost all absorbed in a certain visible calling. When we speak of them we are led to speak of it, when we would speak of it we are led insensibly to speak of them. It is so with Sir Robert Peel. So long as constitutional statesmanship is what it is now, so long as its function is the recording the views of a confused nation, so long as success in it is confined to minds plastic, changeful, administrative,—we must hope for no better man. You have excluded the profound thinker; you must be content with what you can obtain—the businessgentleman.

ART. VII.-THE NOCTES AMBROSIANÆ.

Noctes Ambrosiana. By Professor Wilson. In 4 vols. William Blackwood and Sons: Edinburgh and London, 1856. (Part of a collected re-issue of the Works of Professor Wilson, edited by his Son-in-law, Professor Ferrier.)

It was in the year 1817 that the late Mr. William Blackwood, publisher, of Edinburgh, started in that city a monthly periodical for the advocacy of Tory principles, in opposition to the Edinburgh Review, then at the height of its power under Jeffrey, and without an adequate Tory antagonist in Scotland. The new periodical was conducted for six months under the title of the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine, its editors being a Mr. Pringle and a Mr. Cleghorn, both of them men of some local reputation for talent, and both of them lame. The experiment, however, did not answer expectations; and Mr. Blackwood determined to discontinue it after the sixth number, and to bring out another magazine under more vigorous management. The young Tories of Edinburgh gathered round him; and, in October 1817, there appeared the first number of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Among the contents of this number was the famous "Chaldee Manuscript;" a squib, in which, under the guise of a parody of the biblical language, Mr. Blackwood's difficulties in establishing the new magazine were described in ludicrous apocalypse, and war to the death was proclaimed between him and Mr. Constable, the publisher of the Edinburgh. "The Chaldee Ms.," says Mr. Ferrier, "fell on Edinburgh like a thunderbolt. It took the city by surprise. It was the first trumpet-note which dissolved the trance of Edinburgh and broke the spell of Whig domination." On reading the document itself, which Mr. Ferrier has kindly reprinted for us at the end of one of the present volumes, one can see that the prodigious local effect here attributed to it depended far less on any literary merit which it possessed than on the shock which it gave, on the one hand, to Presbyterian decorum by its daring mimicry of the scriptural style, and the wicked pleasure, on the other hand, which Presbyterians as well as other sinful folks feel in seeing well-known local persons mercilessly burlesqued. It was delightful, for example, for those who were familiar with the appearance of Mr. William Blackwood, to recognise him under the apocalyptic description of "a man clothed in plain apparel, whose name was, as it had been, the colour of ebony;" it was delightful to identify Mr. Constable as "the man