Smith, G: Sir Robert Peel (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Sir Robert Peel

Qualities, and the means by which he rose to the exalted position of Prime Minister. Peel had not those fasci nating endowments which appeal to the dramatic sense in man the highest eloquence was denied him 5 there was nothing romantic, either in the cast of his mind or the circumstances by which he was surrounded, that could stimulate the imagination. If we depict him, it must not be with the brilliant colours of a Titian, but rather with the homely traits of a Teniers. A wise adaptability was one of the root causes of his success. He was a political philo Sopher of the most practical type. He united in himself many of the best characteristics of his countrymen, and was the product of several generations of typical English men He was not a statesman fitted to control the destinies of a nation in moments of supreme peril, and could never have grappled, for example, with the power and resources of a Napoleon. He rose to distinction at a period when England had ceased to be distracted by foreign wars - when she had arrived at a time of transition, and the people clamoured loudly for domestic reforms. Such a period needs rather the sagacious than the origi native statesman, and in every sense Peel was admirably fitted for this new departure in public affairs. He Peel family, which originally had a settlement in Yorkshire, migrated about the year 1600 to Lancashire, where one William Peele established himself near to Blackburn. This ancestor of the future statesman belonged to one of those families of English yeomanry, the members of which have been described as happy in.

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