and a very wealthy man, proud and aristocratic as he was rich. His
riches were acquired by manufacturing cotton goods, like those of his
father before him, whose business he inherited; but the
great-grandfather of Sir Robert was a plain and unimportant cotton
spinner in Lancashire, of no social rank whatever. No noble blood flowed
in the veins of the great premier, nor was he ever ambitious of
aristocratic distinction. He declined an earldom, though rich enough to
maintain its rank. He accepted no higher social rank than what he
inherited, and which came from successful business.

But Peel was educated with great care by an ambitious father. He was
sent to Harrow and Christ Church, and was distinguished as a boy for his
classical attainments, as was Canning before him. At an early age he
reached all the honors that Oxford could bestow; and when he was only
twenty-one was brought into Parliament for the close borough of Cashel,
in Ireland, in the gift of some noble lord. He entered the House of
Commons in 1809, at the same time with Palmerston, and a few years
earlier than Lord John Russell, during that memorable period when
Napoleon was in the midst of his victories, and when a noble
constellation of English statesmen combined their energies for the good
of their country,--Wilberforce, Wyndham, Tierney, Perceval, Grattan,
Castlereagh, Canning, Romilly, Brougham, Mackintosh, Huskisson, and
others,--all trained in the school of Pitt, Fox, or Burke, who had
passed away. Among these great men Peel made his way, not so much by
force of original genius--blazing and kindling like the eloquence of
Canning and Brougham--as by assiduity in business, untiring industry,
and in speech lucidity of statement, close reasoning, and perfect
mastery of his subject in all its details. He was pre-eminently a man of
facts rather than theories. Like Canning and Gladstone, he was
ultra-conservative in his early political life,--probably in a great