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he had now every reason to fear and guard against. Then, again, he had a weak and jealous royal mistress, sensitive, eager for all the gossip of the town, and with an ever-open ear to listen to any thing that could be said against the young and handsome statesman. These all combined to make his position, certainly, not a bed of roses. Notwithstanding all, by his overpowering genius, during the short period of his official term, he accomplished an immense amount of work. He conducted and brought to a happy conclusion the Treaty of Utrecht, which resulted in the security of the Protestant succession, the disuniting the French and Spanish crowns, the destruction of Dunkirk, the enlargement of the British colonies and plantations in America, and full satisfaction of the claims of the allies. Relying upon his own wonderful resources, we find him at one time directing the complicated machinery of foreign politics; then, again, crushing the machinations of his enemies at home; and yet finding time, in the midst of all the hurly-burly of the active events in which he moved, to conduct the skirmishing warfare of a political pamphleteer, now dashing off a pamphlet, now contributing a scathing article for the Examiner. When he was appointed Viscount Bolingbroke, his father is said to have exclaimed, "O Lord, Harry, my boy, I always said you would be hanged; but now I know you will be beheaded." The death of Queen Anne, and the elevation of George the First to the throne, put an end to all his hopes and aspirations, and transformed him from a victorious statesman to a ruined projector. His enemies, led on by Walpole, taking advantage of the distrust entertained for him by the incoming king, were preparing the way for his impeachment; when, apprehending danger, and not knowing how far the malice of his enemies might drive them, he expatriated himself, by escaping to France in disguise. As soon as Parliament assembled, Walpole prepared articles of impeachment, convicted him in his absence, and visited upon him the penalties of degradation from the nobility, the confiscation of his property, and death in the event of his return. The news of this cruel treatment drove him for a short space into the service of the Pretender, then in Paris; and, in an evil hour for his reputation, he accepted the seals from that wretched Prince. His extreme poverty at the time, and the rank injustice of his country, conspired to drive him to this act of folly. As he says, in one of his letters, "the smart of that bill of attainder tingled in every vein." The failure of the rebellion of 1715, unjustly attributed to Bolingbroke's want of foresight by his new master, caused the full weight of his resentment to fall upon him for the failure of an enter

prise, whose defeat was brought about by the blunders and treachery of others. Shortly after his dismissal from the Pretender's service, his first wife being dead, he married Madame Vilette, a niece of the celebrated Madame de Maintenon, which marriage not only brought him a large fortune, but the companionship of the most charming and affectionate of women, the influence of whose love and pure devotion to his interests won him forever from the profligacy that had so long disgraced him. About the year 1723, by means of a bribe of some eleven thousand pounds paid to one of the king's mistresses, the Duchess of Kendal, he at last obtained a pardon under the great seal, and ultimately was restored to the enjoyment of his estates. Seeking no political preferment, "Satis beatus ruris honoribus," as he wrote over the entrance gateway of one of his rural retreats, he passed the residue of his life in philosophic contemplation and literary pursuits. Surrounded and courted by the literary celebrities of his day, the friend and companion of Pope, with the interruption of a few years spent in France, the remainder of his days glided tranquilly along. Contrasted with the stormy outset of his career, the close was remarkably calm and peaceful. The death of his wife, to whom he was much attached, hastened his own, and a year afterward he was laid beside her in the family tomb in the romantic little church of St. John's, at Battersea.

I do not desire to imitate the Greek sophists, with whom it was a favorite exercise to write panegyrics upon human depravity, by laudations on the private life, or commendations of the religious views of Bolingbroke. His private life, up to a certain period, was execrable, but not without palliation. His education had been neglected by his dissolute father; he had been brought up under the pious care of a Puritan grandmother, and a grotesque Puritan preceptor. A boy of eager temper and quick perceptions, he was allowed to feast his capacities on the dry husks of the dismal homilies of Dr. Manton. High-born, with great expectations, with a lavish command of money, celebrated for the brilliancy of his conversation, and a wonderful beauty of person, not only neglected, but holding in hereditary licentiousness an example and excuse, endowed with vehement passions, and thrown in early youth into a society where to be dissipated was to be distinguished-was it any wonder that the years of his youth were passed in evil courses? At the time in which St. John commenced his career, the fashionable circles of London retained the taint of the court of Charles the Second; indeed, they have not yet recovered from the influence of the infection. It must be said for the subject of our sketch,

that no sooner did he find a congenial and tender partner in his second wife--of whom, many years after the union, he speaks with all the enthusiasm of first love, and ail the devotion of tried friendship-than his excesses vanish from the stage. Unlike the confirmed profligate, whom affection retains not, whom years cannot chasten, he exhibited not the odious spectacle of debauched maturity and rakish age.

But deny him moral traits, assail him for irreverence as we will, we must bow to the power of his genius as orator, statesman, or philosopher. As an orator, in the House of Commons, from his very first entrance, he stood head and shoulders above his contemporaries. We have no means of judging of his capacity in this regard, except by the testimony of those contemporaries. Unfortunately, his speeches are as irrevocably lost as those of Cæsar. Within a very few years after his death, nothing remained of them but a splendid tradition. If the style of his declamation resembled at all the style of his writ ten compositions-and this was a style so idiomatic to the man that the conjecture is by no means unwarrantable-it is not difficult to discern the general characteristics. Forcible rather from their manner than their matter, with a grace borrowed from art rather than from nature, fluent and equable in diction, abounding in parallelism and in polished antithesis, if we looked for the prototypes of his speeches in antiquity, we should refer to the rhetorical performances of Isocrates. If we have no remains of his eloquence, by which to judge of its power, we have ample contemporary testimony. Swift says, "that understanding men of both parties had agreed that, in point of memory and judgment, St. John was never equaled." The hostile Burnet speaks of his eloquence "as superhuman." Lord Chesterfield, who had heard him in the Lords, where he produced less effect than in the Commons, gives way to an admiration of his oratory very unusual in so fastidious an arbiter. In a conversation upon the treasures lost to us by time and accident, when one was expressing a wish to recover the lost books of Livy, another the comedies of Menander, Lord Chatham is said to have declared, "he should prefer, on the whole, a speech of Bolingbroke's." One of his contemporaries, after hearing him for hours in the House of Commons, applied the same description that Æschines gave to the Rhodians of the power of Demosthenes: "He is such a man that, were I to wrestle, and throw him, he would persuade you all that he threw me."

In his political career there was no craft or dissimulation about Bolingbroke. He was frank, impetuous, and imprudent to a most singular degree, when one reflects upon the plotting times in which he

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lived, his own great talents, and large experience of men. respect he was the very opposite of Harley-Lord Oxford-for he was a noted instance of a schemer who gains power from both sides, because neither confided in him. Bolingbroke well said of him, "that where any thing could be got, Harley could always wriggle in, and where any misfortune threatened, he could always find a way to wriggle himself out." Bolingbroke was what in our day would be called a most consistent politician. He never betrayed his party, and yet he often resisted its excesses. The administration he served was not unfrequently on the brink of destruction, by the intolerant violence of some of the ultra Tories. With all his ambition, he rarely yielded to their clamor, and yet he never deserted the common cause. While the Godolphins, Marlboroughs, and Harleys, shifted to and fro-all things to all men-St. John remained true and firm to the last. So in bis exile, embittered and galled though he was, he still remained true, until his country and his countrymen treated him as a malefactor, set a price upon his head, confiscated his property, and tried to make his name infamous with posterity. After this he had a right to think that the Stuart might be as good a monarch for England as the Guelf. And yet he afterward manifested the nobility of his nature by refusing to purchase his pardon from the king by the betrayal of any individuals with whom that connection had associated him; and we have Lord Stair's evidence that he insisted especially that it was better to wait with patience, however long, than to arrive with precipitation at his end, by departing from the high road of probity and honor,-"to consent to betray individuals, or to reveal that which has been confided to me, would be to dishonor myself forever,"a scrupulousness which would have been evinced by few politicians of his day.

But the lover of letters will turn from the political life of the subject of this notice, to those hours which, both before and after his reverses, he spent in the congenial society of the literary men whose fame gave such luster to the age in which they lived. This was truly the Augustan age of English literature. The literary men of that era were considered the brightest ornaments of both the courts of Queen Anne and the First George; and there was no one with any pretensions to rank in fashion, from the richest manorial lord to the meanest parasite of the palace, who did not feel honored by the acquaintance, and proud of their intimacy. There might be seen the frank countenance of Steele, in versatility and imprudence, in wit and fancy, the Sheridan of his day; there the contemplative urbanity of

Addison, very agreeable when he pleased it. There, his little spiderlike body full of venom as a toad, was Pope, who had nothing great about him but his mind; nothing fine but his thoughts and his eyes; nothing beautiful but his voice and his numbers.

"A crooked, petulant, malicious wight,

Unfit for commerce, friendship, love, or fight."

There was the little Irish parson, his temper not yet soured, his latent and dark insanity only seen in racy whims and humorous eccentricity -all bustle, and vigor, and nerve, and hope; trifling with a love never to be fully enjoyed, warmed by an ambition never to be realized; and Gay, with his keen love for those commercial pursuits which seldom fail to gild the laurels to which a poet aspires. He made the third of that trio of wits to whom Lord Bolingbroke wrote the epistle most remembered for its address, "To the three Yahoos of Twickenham, Jonathan, Alexander, John, most excellent Triumvirs of Parnassus." Matt. Prior, poet and statesman, witty Dr. Arbuthnot, with his wonderful learning and agreeable conversation, the delicate and classic Parnell, formed, with those we have alluded to above, a literary and social circle of which Bolingbroke was the admired center. There, in Pope's Egerian grot at Twickenham, they often gathered in delightful companionship; or, as the poet himself has better expressed it :—

"There my retreat the best companions grace,
Chiefs out of war, and statesmen out of place.
There St. John mingles with my friendly bowl
The feast of reason and the flow of soul."

It was with these philosophers, poets, and statesmen he spent those "noctes cænæque deum," amid which some of the most agreeable efforts of human wit and genius were produced, in which the little actions of life, the ordinary events of private history, the quarrelings and heart-burnings of political parties, the ruling tastes, the prevailing follies were raised from their vulgar insignificance by the pointed sallies of wit, and the elegant graces of epigram. Of the writings of Bolingbroke, space will not permit us to speak. His style is remarkable, always worn with ease, and possesses in prose that nameless fascination for which Byron is remarkable in verse. His reading was extensive, and his memory prodigious. When Pope was once asked if Bolingbroke knew Hebrew, he answered, “No, but he knows all that has been written about that sort of thing." "His address," said Lord Chesterfield, no mean judge, "pre-engages, his eloquence persuades, and his knowledge informs all who approach him." Such

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