March, 1745, in the sixty-ninth year of his age, of one of the cruelest maladies to which the human frame is subject, and which he bore to the last with unexampled calmness and fortitude.

Lord Brougham, in his "Historical Sketches of Statesmen," thus concludes his admirably drawn character of this great minister:-"To hold up such men as Walpole in the face of the world as the model of a wise, a safe, an honest ruler, becomes the most sacred duty of the impartial historian; and as has been said of Cicero and of eloquence, by a great critic, that statesman may feel assured that he has made progress in the science to which his life is devoted who shall heartily admire the public character of Walpole."

LORD BOLINGBROKE.

IT has been said that Lord Bolingbroke's ambition was to be the modern Alcibiades,-to be at once pre-eminent for excess in every sensual pleasure, and for surpassing energy in ruling a nation's councils. This parallel between the youthful Bolingbroke and the son of Clinias in the earlier part of his career is a true one. It might have been added, that each loved to talk of, but not to practise philosophy; that each was a contemner of his country's creed; and that Bolingbroke's patriotism, like that of Alcibiades, was measured by the extent to which he thought his country's prosperity was likely to promote his own personal aggrandizement. To the high military renown of the Athenian, Bolingbroke can offer no counterpart; but, on the other hand, he was far his superior in eloquence, and in intellectual ascendancy over his contemporaries in a highly intellectual age.

Henry St. John, afterwards Viscount Bolingbroke, was the son of Sir Henry St. John, Baronet, of the ancient family of that name. He was born at the family mansion at Battersea, in Surrey, in 1678. His mother died early; and, as he was the only son by his father's first marriage, he inherited a good estate in Wiltshire, which had been settled on his mother and her issue, and thus acquired an ample independent fortune early in life, though his father lived to an extreme old age.

Most unfortunately for Bolingbroke, his early childhood was passed in the house of his grandfather, Sir Walter St. John, and

8 Lord Mahon's History, vol. i. p. 35.

under the care and tuition of a fanatically puritanical grandmother, and a still more fanatically puritanical Presbyterian preacher, Daniel Burgess. By their mistaken zeal little Henry St. John was daily drugged with the prolix formulas of dull devotion. "I was obliged," he says in part of his writings, "I was obliged, while yet a boy, to read over the commentaries of Dr. Manton, whose pride it was to have made a hundred and nineteen sermons on the hundred and nineteenth Psalm." He in another passage says of this Nonconformist polemic, whose works were made the compulsory staple of his early studies, "Dr. Manton, who taught my youth to yawn, and prepared me to be a high Churchman, that I might never hear him read, nor read him more."

Unhappily the repulsive dogmas of Burgess, Manton, and his grandmother, did more than make Bolingbroke a non-Presbyterian. By a re-action, of which far too many instances might be cited, the quick and high-spirited boy through an injudicious cramming with the doctrines and ritual of a single sect conceived a prejudice against all revealed religion whatsoever. They, who teach children, should always remember that a clever child has a very keen eye for the ridiculous; and that the contempt which such a child acquires for the awkward or silly teacher, even of truth, is easily extended to the truth itself; which becomes thus associated in the pupil's mind with ludicrous or loathsome recollections of the unlucky preceptor, and is fancied to be folly because the child first heard it from a fool.

After having passed some years under this dreary domestic discipline, young St. John was sent to Eton. Here, as afterwards at Christ Church, Oxford, the brilliancy of his genius commanded the admiration both of his fellow-students and his academic rulers. Irregular in everything, he never amassed such ample stores of sound learning as distinguished some of the scholars of his age. With the Greek classics his acquaintance was never more than superficial; but he was extensively and accurately conversant with the Latin writers, and he added to his classical accomplishments the unusual merit of a thorough knowledge of the best writers in his own and other modern languages. He devoted much time and thought to metaphysics-a study which he rightly thought absolutely essential to the man who seeks to make the minds of others acknowledge his own mind's dominion. He was well read in ancient and a consummate master of modern history. He had

ready invention, rich imagination, fluent diction, exquisite taste, shrewd wit, and an unrivalled power of artistic arrangement. Such were his talents; and he had also the energy and the fire which are the attributes of genius alone. Add to these endowments and acquisitions a person both elegant and commanding, an expressive and noble aspect, graceful gesture, and a voice of unrivalled modulation and power; add also the solid advantages, as well as the prestige, of high birth and ample fortune, and we may form some idea of the imposing manner in which young St. John made appearance in the political world of England.

He entered parliament in 1701 as member for Wootton Basset, a Wiltshire borough, that belonged to his family. He had already formed a friendship with Harley, who was the leader in the House of Commons of the Tory party, which was then beginning to make a successful stand in parliament against the Whigs. To him St. John now attached himself as his political chief, and came forward as a zealous champion against low Church and revolution principles.

Such were St. John's abilities and eloquence, that even before the end of his first session, and while he was yet in the twentythird year of his age, he was reckoned one of the most active and efficient members of his party, and was the favourite speaker of the House. He continued to sit in the succeeding parliaments, and to co-operate with Harley. His influence and authority with the Commons continued to increase, and in 1704 he became a member of the Godolphin and Marlborough ministry, the important post of Secretary-at-war being intrusted to his hands; an office which he had the honour of holding during several of the most glorious years of the great war of the succession. His friend Harley was made Secretary of State about the same time. While the dawn of Bolingbroke's political career was thus brilliant, his private life was deformed by the coarsest excesses. had married in 1700 a lady with whom he received considerable property; but his open profligacy soon compelled her to separate herself from him. In a grossly immoral age he made himself notorious both among his countrymen and foreigners for the grossness of his immoralities. Such notoriety seemed indeed to be one of the first objects of his existence; and he lost no opportunity of blazoning his own disgraces.

He

Lord Chesterfield, who was his contemporary, in the elaborate character which he has drawn in one of his letters, while he

pays ample homage to the brilliancy of Bolingbroke's genius, says truly of him, that "he has been a most mortifying instance of the violence of human passion and of the weakness of the most exalted human reason. Impetuosity, excess, and almost extravagancy, characterised not only his passions but even his senses. His youth was distinguished by all the tumult and storm of pleasures, in which he most licentiously triumphed, disdaining all decorum. Those passions were interrupted by a stronger-Ambition. The former impaired both his constitution and his character, but the latter destroyed both his fortune and his reputation."

As is well known, the Marlborough and Godolphin ministry grew by degrees less and less Tory, and eventually became decidedly Whiggish. But Harley and St. John continued to act under it for some time after Rochester and other violent Tories had been removed. Marlborough was at this time personally attached to St. John. He discerned the high intellectual merits of the young orator, who, in return, did justice to the military genius of our first Great Duke. But St. John clung to his old connexion with Harley. He must have known, even if he did not prompt, the back-stair and bed-chamber intrigues by which Harley strove to supplant his own ministerial chiefs, and to rule Queen Anne through Mrs. Masham instead of Marlborough ruling her through his Duchess. Accordingly, in 1708, when the Whigs detected Harley's manœuvres and forced him to resign, St. John resigned also. For two years he was out of parliament,-a period which he employed in the most steady course of study that he ever followed, and a period which he always afterwards justly regarded as the most serviceable to himself of his whole life.

In 1710, when the victory of Abigail over Sarah at Queen Anne's toilet had outweighed all Marlborough's victories in the field, and when Sacheverell's trial had made the Whigs generally unpopular with the squirearchy and populace, St. John shared in Harley's triumphant return to power. He was made Secretary of State, with the supreme direction of foreign affairs; and, as the conclusion of peace with France was the first object of Harley's ministry, St. John held the most arduous and important post in the new cabinet.

Some years afterwards, in his celebrated letter to Sir William Wyndham, Bolingbroke gave a very frank account of the principles on which he and Harley acted. He says, "I am afraid that

we came to Court in the same dispositions as all parties have done; that the principal spring of our actions was to have the government of the State in our hands; that our principal views were the conservation of this power, great employments to ourselves, and great opportunities of rewarding those who had helped to raise us, and of hurting those who stood in opposition to us. It is, however, true, that with these considerations of private and party interest there were others intermingled, which had for their object the public good of the nation, at least what we took to be such."

When a statesman thus openly avows that he made his country's interests secondary to his own, it is idle to discuss his title to the character of a patriot, and difficult to discern his right to be treated as an honest man.

Bolingbroke, however, was not always thus candid; and a large portion of his writings is devoted to the task of proving that the treaty of Utrecht, by which he terminated the war of the succession, was both honourable and advantageous for England. There are many arguments which deserve fair attention on either side of the question, whether the true interests of this nation required a further prosecution of the war, which had originally been commenced by the grand alliance of Austria, England, and Holland, for the purpose of preserving the liberties of Europe, and reducing the exorbitant power of France. Such had been declared by the allies to be the leading principle of their confederacy; the immediate object for which they commenced hostilities, being to prevent the grandson of King Louis of France from reigning as King Philip of Spain. The victories of Marlborough had so broken the power of France, that it would have been idle to think Europe any longer in danger from French arms in 1710. But Philip of Anjou kept possession of the Spanish sceptre which he had grasped; and Bolingbroke, by the treaty of Utrecht, secured it to a Bourbon dynasty. The arguments for and against this celebrated treaty are admirably summed up by Hallam, in his "Constitutional History of England." He and most politicians of recent times decide against Bolingbroke on this point. But even if there be any doubt whether it was impolitic in the English ministry to conclude such a treaty as that of Utrecht, there never has been, and never can be, any doubt as to the baseness of the means by which that treaty was effected. In direct breach of the