was assisting to invest with authority one whose views and policy were
as narrow as his own, and whose practise in carrying them out would
be not less rigid and uncompromising. But, like many others, he lived
long enough to be grievously disappointed by the subsequent career of
him whom the liberal party have since called "the great minister of
progress," and whom their opponents have not scrupled to designate
by appellations not to be repeated in these hours of sorrow and
bereavement. On the 17th of January, 1822, Mr. Peel was installed at
the head of the home department, where he remained undisturbed till
the political demise of Lord Liverpool in the spring of 1827. The most
distinguished man that has filled the chair of the House of Commons
in the present century was Charles Abbott, afterward Lord Colchester.
In the summer of 1817 he had completed sixteen years of hard service
in that eminent office, and he had represented the University for
eleven years. His valuable labors having been rewarded with a pension
and a peerage, he took his seat, full of years and honors, among
the hereditary legislators of the land, and left a vacancy in the
representation of his _alma mater_, which Mr. Peel above all living
men was deemed the most fitting person to occupy. At that time he was
an intense tory--or as the Irish called him, an Orange Protestant
of the deepest dye--one prepared to make any sacrifice for the
maintenance of church and state as established by the revolution of
1688. Who, therefore, so fit as he to represent the loyalty, learning,
and orthodoxy of Oxford? To have done so had been the object of Mr.
Canning's young ambition: but in 1817 he could not be so ungrateful to
Liverpool as to reject its representation even for the early object
of his parliamentary affections. Mr. Peel, therefore, was returned
without opposition, for that constituency which many consider the most
important in the land--with which he remained on the best possible
terms for twelve years. The question of the repeal of the penal