Nothing can be more absurd and wicked in a
statesman than to allow himself to be impounded within the narrow
iron-bound circle of party, and to persevere in sustaining the views and
principles of that party against justice, conscience and fact.
Great and varied as were the powers of Sir Robert Peel as a public
speaker, he was not an orator in the strictest and highest sense of that
word. True oratory is the offspring of genius, and he, gifted though he
was, had not the sacred fire of genius in his soul. In the style which
he adopted, and which was probably the best suited to his natural
powers, he was all but perfect: lucid, argumentation, frank, at least in
seeming, bland, persuasive; always singularly respectful not only to the
House, but to the humblest member of it; his speeches partook more of
the lecture and less of oratorical display than those of most other
public men with anything like his reputation; but they were admirably
suited to an educated and deliberative assembly like the House of
Commons--and hence he influenced--almost ruled it, as no other man did
before or since. Knowing this, he never felt so happy or so much at home
as in that scene of his labours and his triumphs.
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