influences for the government of Ireland. The tranquillity which might
result from a reformed tenure of the soil, must, if attainable, be
a distant blessing, and at present he saw only the obstacles to its
fulfilment--prejudiced landlords, and the claims and necessities of
pauper millions. He shrank from a theory which might be an illusion. He
required a policy for the next post and the next division. There was
in his view only one course to take, to outbid his predecessors as
successfully in Irish politics as he was doing in taxes and tariffs. He
resolved to appropriate the liberal party of Ireland, and merge it into
the great Conservative confederation which was destined to destroy so
many things. He acted with promptitude and energy, for Sir Robert Peel
never hesitated when he had made up his mind. His real character was
very different from his public reputation. Far from being timid
and wary, he was audacious and even headstrong. It was his cold and
constrained demeanour that misled the public. There never was a man who
did such rash things in so circumspect a manner. He had been fortunate
in early disembarrassing himself of the Orange counsellors who had
conducted his Irish questions when in opposition; vacant judgeships
had opportunely satisfied the recognized and respectable claims of
Mr. Serjeant Jackson and Mr. Lefroy; and so Sir Robert Peel, without
a qualm, suddenly began to govern Ireland by sending it 'messages of
peace.'

They took various forms; sometimes a Charitable Bequests Act virtually
placed the Roman Catholic hierarchy in friendly equality with the
prelates of the Established Church; sometimes a 'godless college'
called forth a moan from alarmed and irritated Oxford; the endowment
of Maynooth struck wider and deeper, and the middle-classes of England,
roused from their religious lethargy, called in vain to the rescue of
a Protestantism betrayed. But the minister was unshaken. Successful
and self-sufficient, impressed with a conviction that his government
in duration would rival that of a Walpole or a Pitt, and exceed both
in lustre, he treated every remonstrance with imperious disdain. He had
even accustomed his mind to contemplate an ecclesiastical adjustment
of Ireland which would have allied in that country the Papacy with the
State, and have terminated the constitutional supremacy of the Anglican
Church, when suddenly, in the very heat of all this arrogant fortune,
the mighty fabric of delusio