lessened and limited the hours of children’s factory labour, and made other provisions for their benefit.  It was not all that he had striven for, but it was much; he accepted the compromise, but did not slacken in his efforts still further to improve the condition of the children.  His career of steady benevolence far outstretched this early period of battle and endurance; but already his example and achievement were fruitful of good, and his fellow-labourers were numerous.  Nothing succeeds like success:  people had sneered at the mania for futile legislation that possessed the “humanity-monger” who so embarrassed party leaders with his crusade on behalf of mere mercy and justice; they now approved the practical philanthropist who had taken away a great reproach from his nation, and glorified the age in which they lived because of its special humaneness, while they exulted not less in the brightening prospects of the country.  Sedition overcome, law and order triumphant, the throne standing firm, prosperity returning—­all ministered to pride and hope.

In 1850 there had been some painful incidents; the death by an unhappy accident of Sir Robert Peel, and the turbulent excitement of what are known as the “No Popery” disturbances, being the most notable:  and of these again incomparably the most important was the untimely loss to the country of the great and honest statesman who might otherwise have rendered still more conspicuous services to the Sovereign and the empire.  The sudden violent outburst of popular feeling, provoked by a piece of rash assumption on the part of the reigning Pope, was significant, indeed, as evidencing how little alteration the “Catholic revival” had worked in the temper of the nation at large; otherwise its historic importance is small.  At the time, however, the current of agitation ran strongly, and swept into immediate oblivion an event which three years before would have had a European importance—­the ’death of Louis Philippe, whose strangely chequered life came to an end in the old palace of Claremont, just before the “papal aggressions”—­rash, impolitic, and mischievous, as competent observers pronounced it, but powerless to injure English Protestantism—­had thrown all the country into a ferment, which took some months to subside.  We are told that Her Majesty, though naturally interested by this affair, was more alive to the quarter where the real peril lay than were some of her subjects; but in the universal distress caused by the death of Peel none joined more truly, none deplored that loss more deeply, than the Sovereign, who would willingly have shown her value for the true servant she had lost by conferring a peerage on his widow—­an honour which Lady Peel, faithful to the wishes and sharing the feeling of her husband, felt it necessary to decline.

[Illustration:  Earl of Derby.]