rston's foreign policy. He rode out next day--SS. Peter and
Paul's day--his horse shied and became restive, whilst he was saluting a
lady on Constitution Hill; he was thrown heavily; on being taken up,
partly insensible, he was conveyed to his house, where, having suffered
much pain, he died three days afterwards.

Sir Robert Peel's father, a very wealthy cotton spinner, and also a
Member of Parliament, had early made up his mind that his son should
become a public man. As soon as he was of age he was returned by the
borough of Cashel to the House of Commons, where he soon began to
display those qualities for which his family was
distinguished--prudence, industry, discreet reserve, with a remarkable
ability for utilizing the brains of others. His father, who was made a
baronet by Mr. Perceval, became a millionaire by cotton spinning, yet in
a generation remarkable for invention, neither he nor one belonging to
him originated any of the improvements for preparing or spinning cotton;
when one was made, however, its utility soon became apparent to the
practical good sense of the Peels; they secured it, and thus founded a
house and built up a princely fortune to sustain it; while, too often,
the man whose original genius discovered the improvement, lived and died
in comparative poverty.[100] Sir Robert Peel carried this second-rate,
but most valuable quality, into statesmanship. He was not the originator
of any great political amelioration; he was invariably found, at first,
in opposition to every measure of the kind; but he did not refuse to
examine it; on the contrary, he studied it carefully, weighed the
reasons put forward in support of it, watched with nervous anxiety the
tide of public opinion, and when that could no longer be resisted with
safety, he took the question up and sustained it by the arguments he had
been combating before--remodelled, to be sure, occasionally, but still
the same; threw the weight of his high character into the scale, and
thus not only contributed to its success, but secured it. Such is the
history of Catholic Emancipation and the repeal of the Corn Laws. Hence
a bitter political adversary of his, who has drawn his public character
with much candour and ability, and not in an ungenerous spirit either,
says of him, that "his life was one of perpetual education." Elsewhere
he puts pretty much the same idea in a severer and more sarcastic form,
when he asserts that Sir Robert Peel's mind "was o