history of the country had been prolific in events which had aggravated
the necessity of investigating the sources of the wealth of nations. The
time had arrived when parliamentary preeminence could no longer be
achieved or maintained by gorgeous abstractions borrowed from Burke, or
shallow systems purloined from De Lolme, adorned with Horatian points, or
varied with Virgilian passages. It was to be an age of abstruse
disquisition, that required a compact and sinewy intellect, nurtured in a
class of learning not yet honoured in colleges, and which might arrive at
conclusions conflicting with predominant prejudices.

Adopting this view of the position of Mr. Peel, strengthened as it is by
his early withdrawal for a while from the direction of public affairs, it
may not only be a charitable but a true estimate of the motives which
influenced him in his conduct towards Mr. Canning, to conclude that he was
not guided in that transaction by the disingenuous rivalry usually imputed
to him. His statement in Parliament of the determining circumstances of
his conduct, coupled with his subsequent and almost immediate policy, may
perhaps always leave this a painful and ambiguous passage in his career;
but in passing judgment on public men, it behoves us ever to take large
and extended views of their conduct; and previous incidents will often
satisfactorily explain subsequent events, which, without their
illustrating aid, are involved in misapprehension or mystery.

It would seem, therefore, that Sir Robert Peel, from an early period,
meditated his emancipation from the political confederacy in which he was
implicated, and that he has been continually baffled in this project. He
broke loose from Lord Liverpool; he retired from Mr. Canning. Forced again
into becoming the subordinate leader of the weakest government in
parliamentary annals, he believed he had at length achieved his
emancipation, when he declared to his late colleagues, after the overthrow