e, namely Canning, whose brilliancy made his shallowness less
visible, and whose graces, of style and elocution threw a vail over
his unsoundness and lubricity. Sir Robert Peel was no satirist or
epigrammatist: he was only a statesman in public life: only a virtuous
and friendly man in private. _Par negotiis, nee supra_. Walpole alone
possessed his talents for business. But neither Peel nor his family
was enriched from the spoils of his country; Walpole spent in building
and pictures more than double the value of his hereditary estate, and
left the quadruple to his descendants.

Dissimilar from Walpole, and from commoner and coarser men who
occupied the same office, Peel forbade that a name which he had
made illustrious should be degraded and stigmatized by any title
of nobility. For he knew that all those titles had their origin and
nomenclature from military services, and belong to military men, like
their epaulets and spurs and chargers. They sound well enough against
the sword and helmet, but strangely in law-courts and cathedrals: but,
reformer as he was, he could not reform all this; he could only keep
clear of it in his own person.

I now come to the main object of my letter.

Subscriptions are advertised for the purpose of raising monuments
to Sir Robert Peel; and a motion has been made in Parliament for
one in Westminster Abbey at the public expense, Whatever may be the
precedents, surely the house of God should contain no object but
such as may remind us of His presence and our duty to Him. Long ago I
proposed that ranges of statues and busts should commemorate the great
worthies of our country. All the lower part of our National Gallery
might be laid open for this purpose. Even the best monuments in
Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's are deformities to the edifice. Let
us not continue this disgrace. Deficient as we are in architects,
we have many good statuaries, and we might well employ them on the
statues of illustrious commanders, and the busts of illustrious
statesmen and writers. Meanwhile our cities, and especially the
commercial, would, I am convinced, act more wisely, and more
satisfactorily to the relict of the deceased, if, instead of statues,
they erected schools and almshouses, with an inscription to his
memory.

We glory in about sixty whose busts and statues may occupy what are
now the "deep solitudes and awful cells" in our national gallery. Our
literary men of eminence are happily more nume