His reverent admiration of Peel, whom he knew, is quite irreconcilable with his savage contempt of Gladstone, whom he did not know.

Peel was a great parliamentary statesman, and Gladstone was his disciple.

Both belonged equally to the class which Carlyle denounced as the ruin of England, and rose to supreme power through the representative system that he especially abhorred.

On no important point, while Peel was alive, did they differ.

"On the whole," said Gladstone, "Peel was the greatest man I ever knew," and in finance he was always a Peelite.
That a man who was four times Prime Minister of England could have been a canting hypocrite, deceiving himself and others, implies that the whole nation was fit for a lunatic asylum.