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In our very inefficient notice of this remarkable volume, we have chosen rather to point out evidences of those qualities which have always constituted the strength and value of Wordsworth's poetry, than to follow the author's own division, or to take it in chronological order. We would not willingly forestall the delight of the reader in tracing out the plan and purpose of the poem for himself. Many new and beautiful thoughts, forcible images, touching incidents and recollections, we have passed by without comment or allusion. What we have wished to call attention to is the prominence of certain characteristics, which did, we believe, make the poet what he was-which were the main secret of his power, and the elements of his greatness. Poetry he defines as the image of man and of nature; but there are various reflections of this image; his knowledge of man was drawn from the deep searches into his own heart, of which we have the history in this volume-from hence, he gained his insight into the universal heart of man. Whatever he knew of passion, or emotion, was from this source. Whatever could be learned from the face of nature, by looking into himself, whatever sympathy could teach him, that he knew; but his was not the gift of penetration into individual minds; he had not what is meant by a knowledge of human nature, which implies a perception of minute differences and distinctions; his own heart told him of the great affections, those impulses which sway us all, wherein we are all one. He could not trace, with any subtle truth, the local influences, the idiosyncracies which make each man different from his fellow; and his teaching is of the character to be expected from this. It is not in direct lessons, in axioms such as are framed by those who form theories out of themselves from acute watching and weighing of others, but he gives his own intuitions and experience; he tells us what is in one mind with an intricate truth and faithfulness we had not known before, and we recognise in it the pulse of the universal human heart. He is not didactic; we seldom meet with a philosophical precept, or a formal practical rule for the guidance of conduct, but we have the inner life itself of one mind, and we may learn precious things from it.

And what may be said of his collective labours may especially be asserted of the present poem, which gives, as it were, the secret of his inspiration, and takes us to the very source of that benignant stream, which flowed so long for our healing and refreshment. Back to that source he was for ever looking, and hence the appropriateness of this latest memorial. Always true to himself and to his genius, he was never truer than when he thus connected the close of life with its earliest dawn, and made the history of his youth the gift of his latest age.

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ART. IV.-The Opinions of the Right Honourable Sir Robert Peel, expressed in Parliament and in Public. Second Edition, with a Biographical Memoir. London: Hall, Virtue & Co. 1850. THE position in which the people of England found themselves instantaneously placed upon the 3d of July was one of singular difficulty, and would, but for the distressing nature of the accident which led to it, have been one of peculiar interest to any philosophical bystander. We had living amongst us a statesman, a man of acknowledged great ability, not long since the virtual ruler of the realm, and up to that day a moving cause in every thing that his successors dared to attempt of home policy. His career had not been an ordinary one: and at that moment, as for years, the feelings with which it had been regarded were as various as they were intense. One impression at least was universal and unvaried, that his course was not yet run, and that in his future policy, whatever it might be, the Odyssey of Britain's history for many a coming year was wrapped. Some few there might be, sanguine or dreamy journalists, who ventured a further flight, and strove to forecast the judgment of posterity, on that far-off day when Sir Robert Peel should have become a name of the past; but even these scarcely dared to publish such convictions. After much delay thegreat Commoner' spoke upon the great foreign debate. 'We are glad we know what Peel thinks,' was the national comment. In the midst of all this, a vicious horse follows the impulse of brute instinct; a few days of painful interest in the sufferings of the sick-room follow, and then the people of England hear one morning that Peel is gone, and all dreams of hope or hatred are vanished; that they must cach for himself, without concert or assistance, the journalist and his reader, the Protectionist and the Leaguer, pronounce his verdict on the man they cannot realize as not amongst them. The answer to this startling demand was, to our minds, one of the most gratifying instances of that honest, healthy feeling which does somehow (although we are our own portrait painter in so bragging) distinguish the English character. Instantaneously, as if by word of command, all one's bitterness on the one side, and on the other, that desire which is so natural to our poor race, to reserve the memory of one's hero to one's own party, were laid aside, and universal Britain joined to proclaim that a famous and a good man was dead, and must be honoured.

Now that some time has passed away since the death of Sir Robert Peel, we may, without indelicacy, enter into that

examination of his character and position, which it would not have been right to have undertaken in the earlier days of the national grief. In so doing, we feel that we have taken upon ourselves a delicate and difficult task, and one in the fulfilment of which we anticipate that we shall dissatisfy many of very different opinions; for we must, at the outset, honestly acknowledge that, while on the one hand, we have never compassed an initiation into that idolatry of Sir Robert Peel in which so many seem to have found consolation, so, on the other, we have never been able to discern in him that personification of the spirit of evil, which has haunted the dreams of our Sibthorps and our Tyrrells.

The universal intensity of feeling with which the news of our last statesman's death was received, not merely in England, but abroad-in the courts of kings, and in the National Assembly of Republican France-is indicative of his having been the man of his age, in a sense in which none of his contemporaries, Russell or Stanley, could ever hope to be; at the same time, it is far from proving that he was, therefore, incontestibly the man above his age. National grief, to be so very extensive, must either be entirely unselfish, and then the person whose loss evokes it must, indeed, have been truly great, or else the idea of individual loss must enter largely into it; and the extended lamentation may be even a less certain criterion of superhuman grandeur, than that frequent silence which succeeds the departure of those of whom the world was not worthy, morally or intellectually. We are far from intending to imply that the great and sincere national grief felt for Sir Robert Peel was not the just tribute to great talents and great industry, unsparingly and honestly lavished on the public service; but we do venture to assert that, if any one were to contend that, because the honours which have been paid to Sir Robert Peel were such as no other statesman has ever received, he was, therefore, the greatest of statesmen, he would be hazarding a fallacy. A cursory glance at the principal events of the late Minister's life, will at once show that his history was absolutely unique in the annals of statecraft. Other statesmen have been distinguished for the unswerving pertinacity with which they have, throughout their whole career, acted up to one given line of policy. Others have derived their fame from the honesty and boldness with which, the instant they discovered that the cause to which they had engaged themselves could no longer approve itself to their conscience, they passed through that martyrdom of change (so painful to a generous mind), and joined their quondam opponents. Others, again, there have been whose whole career has been but the record of ambition,

of place, or fame, or money, and whose uncertain changes have only been redeemed in the eyes of history by the illusory glare of talents and eloquence.

To none of those classes can Sir Robert Peel be referred. Consistent he was not; nor, on the other hand, does his career at all betray that species of common-place inconsistency which we have adduced as the characteristic of the third class of statesmen. His history is throughout a strange phenomenon. Fresh from academic honours, the son of a millionaire, yet not endowed with lengthened pedigree, he early found himself linked to a great aristocratic party, of long existence, great power, singular administrative talent, illustrious prestige, ancestral haughtiness, and much nobility of aim, combined with various qualities which rendered it, in its unchanged condition, unsuited for the age in which it found itself. To this party, wholly, and without reserve, young Peel, full of literary distinction-Oxford's first double-first-committed himself, and at the age of twenty-two, like William Pitt, he found himself in office; but unlike William Pitt, this office was not First Lord of the Treasury, but Under-Secretary of State. However, for a man to be Under-Secretary at twenty-two, he must have something in him. Nine years rolled on-the years of Waterlooand Mr. Peel had in the meanwhile risen to the honourable post of Irish Secretary,—the stern, uncompromising Tory, of the good old breed,- Orange Peel!' as he was familiarly designated, the challenger of O'Connell, and the originator of the Constabulary Force; a very meritorious piece of practical machinery of the sort, which with all their science and parade of doctrinaire exactness, Whigs, in some way or other, very seldom hit off, or if they do so, generally mar in the working. Then came an epoch-the Currency crisis-and at the head of that Committee which was to spread dismay into the ranks of the innovators was placed the rising man of the party. The Committee sat, and heard its evidence, and published its Report; and its Chairman had vanished from his official place, the victim, as one side said, the convert, as the others deemed him, of his own inquiry. But, after all, the Currency question was not the germ of Toryism, and such a conversion might be pardonable, even in the eyes of the most bigotted. Accordingly, after a brief period of decorous penance, we find Mr. Peel in the Cabinet as Home Secretary,-that Cabinet, the one in which Lord Liverpool presided, and the buttress of the Church, Lord Eldon, held the Seals. The long-vexed question of Roman Catholic Emancipation was then the battle field, and Mr. Secretary Peel stoutly combatted the innovation, prime leader of the Orange Corps. In the midst of the mélée,

Lord Liverpool, by a providential infliction, was incapacitated, and the old phalanx fell to pieces, eight years after the Currency Committee, to be replaced by its liberal section, headed by Canning. Death very soon removed him from the fierce parliamentary conflict in which he found himself engaged with his After Lord Goderich's vain attempt to pick up younger rival. the stragglers, came in that famous Cabinet, of which the Duke of Wellington was nominal sole chief, and Mr. Peel the real co-ordinate minister. The autumn of 1828 is not yet forgotten, when Mr. Peel, the Protestant champion, was feasted through England. In due time, the Session of 1829 opened. What the great measure of 1829 turned out to be, and who it was that moved it, need not be detailed.

The result of this concession of Roman Catholic Emancipation on the part of a Tory Ministry, entirely changed the moral condition of that party, or at least of the section of it which remained in office. They had abandoned their old position and dogma of changelessness, and had to choose between the alternatives of possessing no principles, or of advocating moderate and progressive reform. The Emancipation question once settled, the further one of the whole constitution of the House of Commons opened itself. To any reasoning man, it might, we should have thought, have been quite clear, that the old terminus-like attitude being abandoned, the secondary benefits resulting from the existing organization of the House of Commons could not be pleaded in favour of no alteration at all being admitted into it, and that the fact of Old Sarum and Gatton having at various times served as the refuge of Cabinet Ministers, did not quite constitute a logical argument, why Manchester and Birmingham should not be represented, alongside at least of the older and less populous boroughs. When things were just at this point, the revelations of the East Retford election opened such a door for a brilliant coup, as few ministers have ever been lucky enough to find ready made to their hands. But the Duke' was in his trenches, and proclaimed no surrender. What was the philosophy of party polemics to him? Emancipation had, to be sure, been wrested from him; but what had Emancipation to do with boroughs? And, accordingly, the dialectic leader of the Lower House proved the utter unreasonableness of the supposition, that while all other social and political arrangements changed with the times, the least modification in the national representation could be admitted, even the enfranchisement of those towns which were the staples of England's manufactures.

In this case the current of events deceived the watchers on the beach; and the slight misfortune of Lord Grey's leader in

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