Leicester-square,* he may find a state of things to which the effervescence of his countrymen would be as mere limonade, and he would no longer regret the loss of his little pied à terre in Albion. When he was over here before, it was each time during the access of one of those popular panics and ferments which have been gradually preceding the grand eruptionever since a diseased currency and a debt was at work in the vitals of England. Our ancien régime is now broken up. We are recurring to first principles in a state of disease; beginning to play fair for the first time, with no cards; commencing cash payments with everybody, with a grand insolvency beneath, which would even otherwise require almost a miracle to stop it. A third phase awaits the gentle creed of Lamartine. When America and France have declared war, and our fleet is in ordinary or cruising in the Mediterranean; when Ireland has not a recruit left and the Brazilians insult and threaten us; when Canada revolts and the Pope plays the antics of anathema from the Vatican-let Lamartine write a third opinion upon the prosperity of England! OCTOBER, 1850. THE APOTHEOSIS OF PEEL. PEEL is a fine subject for after-dinner enthusiasm. Now that he is departed, he is, to a certain extent, a safe subject, whilst the melancholy manner of his death adds grace to the lavish encomiums with which friend and foe appear alike to overwhelm his memory. We confess that his untimely end * We beg M. Lamartine's pardon. We have since remembered that he is married to an Englishwoman. Still Even prevents our expressing ourselves completely upon the political character and conduct of this modern statesman. justice must finally be done; and as Peel has become, since his death, a British monomania, that which we say must pass muster with his relatives and admirers, just as their ridiculous encomiums are endured by us with an indifferent nod or benevolent shrug of good-humoured scepticism. Prince Albert has just put the finishing stroke on this political or social absurdity at York. He has so gilded the splendid mediocrity of Peel, that the finest barley-sugar edifice, tipsy cake, or flummery upon the groaning civic board, must have felt mean in comparison with the SaxeGotha panegyric. In Heaven's name, we exclaim, what has this benefactor of his species done? The English worship him. The French adore him-ce cher Sir Peel. Russia loved him. Do Mazzini and the Pope lament him together? Does Garibaldi put up prayers for him through his fat Friar Tuck chaplain? Where, in the name of superficiality, defunct one-pound notes, and decorum, does the popularity of Peel find a limit? What did he do? What did he say? Was it kind in him to exist-cruel in him to die? What was he to have done? The latter problem is answered by his removal; for no one can tell what additional blessing was to have been expected from Peel, except his walking through the Great Exhibition in a yellow waistcoat, or expressing a gentlemanly forbearance on the subject of the new Roman Catholic Primate. Was Peel to have paid the national debt, or stopped the Irish famine? For our own part, we are infinitely more inclined to lament the late Lord George Bentinck; because he felt as an Englishman and sympathized with Ireland; because he possessed a sound head and a talent for calculation, and seemed to fill up a gap, and might have been a clog in the wheel of destiny, which hurries on at a railroad pace the ruin of England. What did Peel do ?—He followed nobly in the wake of conviction, when he could not help it, and was continually in a state of political transition. Was he a genuine Reformer?-Certainly not. Was he a liberal?-Of a very bastard nature. As for Catholic Emancipation, we think England will lament the day when one single act was granted or voted to set free an enemy within her Palladium, whose avowed principles are hostility, and who takes everything; but never concedes a single point to those who are not with it and of it. The effect of Peel's return to the metallic standard was to destroy thousands, and shake our institutions to the centre. He has yielded to the cheap loaf and betrayed the agricultural interest. The consequences are still on the cards. Things have lasted his time. Finesse in him supplied every great quality. A flow of words and a pleasant manner made him an orator. Is there one grand sentence, one great truth, one mighty apophthegm to which Peel has ever given utterance? Did he ever approach the eloquence of Burke, or Sheridan? Had he a spark of genius? Was he consistent, we will not say, honourable? For, whilst we hold it to be in accordance with honour to yield to conviction, at the expense of party, previous education, or prior assertion, and conceive the reverse of such conduct to be dishonourable towards a country; yet a pledge holds good so far as this—that a man has no right practically to desert one party, and leave it in the lurch, in order to tender his services to another. The only virtue left him is to retire. To trim the sails of popularity, for a man's own sake, is one thing; to yield to conviction, at the sacrifice of public office and action, is another. None better understood how to enhance the value of what he effected during his lifetime than Peel, or set a greater price upon his own measures: and lately the country has followed his example. No man ever furnished a more complete illustration of the Scripture parable than Peel. He was the labourer in the vineyard of Reform at the eleventh hour, and came in, not for an equal, but a double share of wages. His were the merits of political intrigue, and he admitted no man to his confidence. Peel was merely considered as a great Reformer, for lending the splendour of his name to other men's ideas, and for changing his own principles. He was pompous, rhetorical, and vain; consummately skilled in the art of thrusting his self-importance upon others; a great and polished Bottom the weaver in political life; the smooth and discreet, we will not say hypocritical, manager of party. It does appear to us that the nation is in its dotage, when it transcends the adoration which the Spartans might have felt for Leonidas, the Romans for Curtius, or the Americans for Washington, to waste its hero-worship on the smirk, self-satisfied ghost of the banquet-haunting Peel. Posterity will in vain inquire the reason. It may be answered that England had none better. Peel was the sober light of a declining age. But the future does not recognise the mere attributes of a plausible superficiality. Posterity demands a man with lights and shadows on his features, whereby his character may be written in men's minds-a statue of bronze, not an image of gutta percha. Peel will glide into oblivion, even as he has rolled forth conventionally into notice. The glories of England are identified not with minutiæ, but principles; not with tergiversation, but facts; not with the self-preservation of a petty egotist rowing with dexterity in the wake of self-generated reforms, but with the glorious instincts of a patriot blended with the experience of a statesman, who points down the vale of ages with his sword, and whose battle-cry is " Forward! On!" THE TILT OF GLEN TILT. HENCEFORWARD let the adage run, "Give a Duke a bad name and hang him!" We suppose that there never was an individual more plentifully abused on all sides for an affair which is ludicrous, and capable at any rate of a twosided explanation, than his Grace the Duke of Athol. We know not whether to call this very English or un-English. It savours much both of the one and the other,―i. e., according to the fashion of the day, it is exceedingly English, and, according to old notions of English justice, it is most unmanly and unfair. The Cambridge Students, the Lord Provost of Perth (some modern Nicoll Jarvie, without his good humour), and the Briareus of the Press, have hitherto had it all their own way; and we believe that the Duke would meet with a reception not much more flattering than · that accorded to Haynau, were he to show himself in London, merely because at the worst he has been ill-tempered and unsociable, and has played the Highland Laird in the nineteenth century to the disgust of single-shirted tourists, and knapsack-bearing, prying, inquisitive, pert, forward Collegians, who, knowing that the act was odious to him, chose rather to intrude upon a nobleman's premises, on the strength of a parish or sessions' decision, than pen a note to ask permission, or display that courtesy which prefers gracefully |