Disraeli. It all depends upon your standard. What is a pound? In the currency of Parliament and in the estimation of the country Peel was a great man.

In one respect only do I find myself like Mr. Goulburn "in a peculiar society." I (no doubt I am wrong) deeply regret the publication of the Disraeli letters. Magnanimity is so beautiful a thing that its essential privacy should be preserved as a noble family tradition even at the expense of the public. Had Peel chosen in 1846 to produce the letter of 1841, of the existence of which he gave Disraeli a pretty broad hint, nobody could have complained and Disraeli could have replied. Peel did not do so, and what he, magnanimously, in the heat of conflict, and in the face of insult, forbore from doing, Mr. Parker does in 1899. It is of the essence of magnanimity that it should be complete and eternal. Unless it is that it is no magnanimity at all. To suppress a document for fifty years and until the man who wrote it is dead is no kindness. No good has been done by publication. For a couple of days the Tadpoles and the Tapers, that breed of curs, ran about sniffing and snuffing over the letters; the young lions of the press roared over them, rejoicing that their client, the public, should be let behind the scenes. But the manyheaded Beast is not nearly so big a fool as those who cater for his capacious maw would often have us believe. The many-headed knows its Disraeli perfectly well, and how he never pretended to be a man of nicety. He ate his peck of dirt and achieved his measure of dignity. In the vulgar struggle for existence Disraeli did some mean and shabby things; the letter of 1841 was perhaps one

of them, the denial of it in 1846 was perhaps another, but a mean and shabby man Disraeli was not, and his reputation, such as it is, stands just where it did before these disclosures. The two letters are out of place in these stately memorials of a saviour of society. They jar upon you like a vulgar word scribbled on the pedestal of a noble statue. When the Chancellor of the Exchequer the other day made his annual reference to the rise in the value of our shares in the Suez Canal, never were the cheers louder. Disraeli, too, had his day; and though, for my part, I would as soon think of coupling Dr. Johnson with Jacques Casanova as Peel with Disraeli, I can still, remembering all the differences in the circumstances of the two men, find room for a regret that these memoirs should be made the vehicle of seeking to cast an unnecessary slur upon the memory of a man who, when all is said and done, will remain the author of the finest literary tribute to the character of Peel ever likely to be written.

T

THE PRIVATE LETTERS OF

SIR ROBERT PEEL1

(The Nation, 1921)

HIS is a very interesting book, for from almost every page strong sidelights are cast upon the mentality of a man who was not only amongst the greatest (the list is not very long) of English statesmen, but was declared to be by one who had watched him in the House of Commons at only too close quarters "the greatest member of Parliament that ever lived."

Sir Robert Peel, though a keen "shot" and an indefatigable slaughterer of small game, was a slowmoving man, both in mind and body. His temperament was not only pre-eminently conservative and cautious, but was not without a touch of that slavishness so noticeable in his most distinguished pupil, Gladstone. And yet what a life he led the Tory Party! A cat among the pigeons! And how exciting and mobile was his own political career, and how gravely, yet how courageously, he faced the questions of the day, and talked with his bitter enemies in the gate.

In these harum-scarum days when no one can guess beforehand what a Prime Minister will say, or how he will say it, it is something of a relief to while away a few hours over three admirably edited

The Private Letters of Sir Robert Peel. Edited by George Peel (Murray).

volumes of Mr. C. S. Parker, entitled Sir Robert Peel. From his Private Papers (1891-1899). No finer memorial, dignified but moving, exists of a public man; and there as on a pedestal, “more lasting than brass," will ever stand the tall and stately figure of the Sir Robert who kept revolution at bay, and who is as firmly imbedded in our national history as the very different figure of that other Sir Robert, who a century earlier prevented the Stuarts from returning to Whitehall.

Peel may be accounted lucky in his memorial volumes. Disraeli, in his bizarre, but ever fascinating Life of Lord George Bentinck, has devoted a chapter to the character and personality of the man he tortured and defamed-a chapter that tempts us to make the same smuggish remark which Milton has put into the mouth of Adam when the Almighty shows him for the first time the beautiful Mother of Mankind:

This turn doth make amends.

Disraeli has certainly succeeded in doing what Sir Robert himself usually failed to do in making Peel interesting. Furthermore, another writer, to us as agreeable and more edifying than Disraeli, Dr. Newman, has in one of his discursive contributions to controversial literature thrown light upon some aspects of Peel's mentality.

Towards the end of 1840, Sir Robert, setting the example to Sir Barnes Newcome, who lectured his constituents on "Mrs. Hemans and the Poetry of the Affections," gave an address at Tamworth, on the opening of a reading-room to be run on nonsectarian lines, to which discourse we see, from the

volume now under review, Lady Peel writing to her "dear, dearest Frederick" refers: "You shall certainly have your Papa's pamphlet of his beautiful speech at Tamworth as soon as it comes out. The one you have seen advertised is not the true one" (p. 175). This "beautiful speech," as reported in the newspapers, attracted Newman's attention, and being, as considering the occasion it could hardly help being, full of "Broughamism," with a touch of "Benthamism," and a glorification of the "Pursuit of Learning under Difficulties," and the "Diffusion of Useful Knowledge," drew from this ever eager controversialist on such subjects four letters to the Times, which may now be read with delight in Newman's Discussions and Arguments under the title "The Tamworth Reading-Room." More eloquent letters have never been addressed to an editor. When it is a question of ridiculing the pretensions of man to be a reasoning animal, Montaigne, Pascal, and Newman attain the same rare altitudes; and the way they exercise their reasoning powers in abusing reason (of whom, one cannot help seeing, they are all the time desperately afraid) never fails to excite our admiration. In the course of these letters Newman has occasion to make many interesting and searching remarks about Sir Robert Peel, for whose statesmanship, character, and piety he had (being, like Peel, an Oxford man) great regard, though the one Oxonian could never forgive the other for saying that the 'pleasures of physical science" could impart "consolation" to a dying man.

Peel's grandson has in this volume (and we are grateful to him for it) lit another candle for us, a