The first Sir Robert Peel was the third son of a small cotton-printer in Lancashire. Enterprising and ambitious, he left his father’s establishment, and became a junior partner in a manufactory, carried on at Bury by a relative, Mr. Haworth, and his future father-in-law, Mr. Yates. His industry, his genius, soon gave him the lead in the management of the business, and made it prosperous. By perseverance, talent, economy, and marrying a wealthy heiress—Miss Yates, the daughter of his senior partner—he had amassed a considerable fortune at the age of forty. He then began to turn his mind to politics; published a pamphlet on the national debt; made the acquaintance of Mr. Pitt, and got returned to parliament (1790) for Teignmouth, where he had acquired landed property which the rest of his life was spent in increasing. In Greville’s journals we read:—“Grant gave me a curious anecdote of old Sir Robert Peel. He was the younger son of a merchant; his fortune very small, left to him in the house, and he was not to take it out. He gave up the fortune, and started in business without a shilling, but as the active partner in a concern with two other men—Yates, whose daughter he afterwards married, and another, who between them made up £6,000. From this beginning he left £250,000 a-piece to his five younger sons, £60,000 to his three daughters, each; and £22,000 a-year in land, and £450,000 in the funds to Peel. In his lifetime he gave Peel £12,000 a-year; the others £3,000, and spent £3,000 himself. He was always giving them money, and for objects which, it might have been thought, he under-valued. He paid for Peel’s house when he built it, and for the Chapeau de Paille (2,700 guineas) when he bought it.” In his biography, Sir William Fairbairn describes the heroic way in which he mastered the difficulties of early years, and became famous. It really seems that there is something in the air, or in the nature of the inhabitants, of the northern districts of the kingdom, which has a tendency, more or less, to make a man rise in the world. The poet tells us how “Caledonia, stern and wild, Is meet nurse for poetic child.” Though, as to that, neither Burns nor Scott had much to do with that part of Scotland we call stern and wild. But the country may claim to do more for her sons. Every one of them seems born with a thirst for getting on in the world, for revolving not to be contented with that position in life in which Providence has placed him; and thus it is, that when we come to examine minutely into the lives of our heroes, industrial or otherwise, we find that most of them were Scotchmen, or, more or less, had Scotch blood in their veins. Of this we have a remarkable illustration in the case of the late Sir William Fairbairn, who was, moreover, a worthy representative of a class of men to whom we owe, in a large measure, the wealth and prosperity our country now enjoys.