PREFACE.

It was most reluctantly that I determined to suspend, during the
last autumn, a work which is the business and the pleasure of my
life, in order to prepare these Speeches for publication; and it
is most reluctantly that I now give them to the world. Even if I
estimated their oratorical merit much more highly than I do, I
should not willingly have revived, in the quiet times in which we
are so happy as to live, the memory of those fierce contentions
in which too many years of my public life were passed. Many
expressions which, when society was convulsed by political
dissensions, and when the foundations of government were shaking,
were heard by an excited audience with sympathy and applause,
may, now that the passions of all parties have subsided, be
thought intemperate and acrimonious. It was especially painful
to me to find myself under the necessity of recalling to my own
recollection, and to the recollection of others, the keen
encounters which took place between the late Sir Robert Peel and
myself. Some parts of the conduct of that eminent man I must
always think deserving of serious blame. But, on a calm review
of his long and chequered public life, I acknowledge, with
sincere pleasure, that his faults were much more than redeemed by
great virtues, great sacrifices, and great services. My
political hostility to him was never in the smallest degree
tainted by personal ill-will. After his fall from power a
cordial reconciliation took place between us: I admired the
wisdom, the moderation, the disinterested patriotism, which he
invariably showed during the last and best years of his life; I
lamented his untimely death, as both a private and a public
calamity; and I earnestly wished that the sharp words which had