if indeed it were not something less; and though Temple threw the blame of this on the king, on Lord Shaftesbury, on everybody but himself, it is evident that the failure of his plan is to be traced to its own inherent defects. His Council was too large to transact business which required expedition, secrecy, and cordial co-prorogue the new Parliament for a year, and operation. A cabinet was therefore formed within the Council. The cabinet and the majority of the Council differed; and, as was to be expected, the cabinet carried their point. Four votes outweighed six-and-twenty. This being the case, the meetings of the thirty were not only useless, but positively obnoxious.

At the ensuing election, Temple was chosen for the University of Cambridge. The only objection that was made to him by the members of that learned body was, that in his little work on Holland he had expressed great approbation of the tolerant policy of the States; and this blemish, however serious, was overlooked in consideration of his high reputation, and of the strong recommendations with which he was furnished by the court.

decidedly unfavourable to the government; and Shaftesbury impatiently expected the day when the Houses were to meet. The king, guided by the advice of the inner cabinet, determined on a step of the highest importance. He told the Council that he had resolved to requested them not to object; for he had, he said, considered the subject fully, and had made up his mind. All who were not in the secret were thunderstruck-Temple as much as any. Several members rose and entreated to be heard against the prorogation. But the king silenced them, and declared that his resolution was unalterable. Temple, greatly hurt at the manner in which both himself and the Council had been treated, spoke with great spirit. He would not, he said, disobey the king by objecting to a measure on which his majesty was determined to hear no argument; but he would most earnestly entreat his majesty, if the present Council was incompetent to advise him, to dissolve it and select another; for it was absurd to have councillors who did During the summer he remained at Sheen, not counsel, and who were summoned only to and amused himself with rearing melons; leav-be silent witnesses of the acts of others. The ing to the three other members of the inner king listened courteously. But the members cabinet the whole direction of public affairs. of the cabinet resented this reproof highly; Some unexplained cause began, about this time, and from that day Temple was almost as much to alienate them from him. They do not ap- estranged, from them as from Shaftesbury. pear to have been made angry by any part of his conduct, or to have disliked him personally. But they had, we suspect, taken the measure of his mind, and satisfied themselves that he was not a man for that troubled time, and that he would be a mere encumbrance to them: living themselves for ambition, they despised his love of ease. Accustomed to deep stakes in the game of political hazard, they despised his piddling play. They looked on his cautious measures with the sort of scorn with which the gamblers at the ordinary, in Sir Walter Scott's novel, regarded Nigel's practice of never touching a card but when he was certain to win. He soon found that he was left out of their secrets. The king had, about this time, a dangerous attack of illness. The Duke of York, on receiving the news, returned from Holland. The sudden appearance of the detested Popish successor excited anxiety throughout the country. Temple was greatly amazed and disturbed. He hastened up to London and visited Essex, who professed to be astonished and mortified, but could not disguise a sneering smile. Temple then saw Halifax, who talked to him much about the pleasures of the country, the anxieties of office, and the vanity of all human things, but carefully avoided politics, and when the duke's return was mentioned, only sighed, shook his head, shrugged his shoulders, and lifted up his eyes and hands. In a short time Temple found that his two friends had been quizzing him; and that they had themselves sent for the duke in order that his Royal Highness might, if the king should die, be on the spot to frustrate the designs of Monmouth.

He was soon convinced, by a still stronger proof, that though he had not exactly offended his master, or his colleagues, in the cabinet, he had ceased to enjoy their confidence. The result of the general election had been

He wished to retire altogether from business. But just at this time, Lord Russell, Lord Cavendish, and some other councillors of the popular party, waited on the king in a body, declared their strong disapprobation of his measures, and requested to be excused from attending any more at Council. Temple feared that if, at this moment, he also were to withdraw, he might be supposed to act in concert with those decided opponents of the court, and to have determined on taking a course hostile to the government. He therefore continued to go occasionally to the board, but he had no longer any real share in the direction of public affairs.

At length the long term of the prorogation expired. In October, 1680, the Houses met; and the great question of the Exclusion was revived. Few parliamentary contests in our history appear to have called forth a greater display of talent; none certainly ever called forth more violent passions. The whole nation was convulsed by party spirit. The gentlenen of every county, the traders of every town, the boys at every public school, were divided into exclusionists and abhorrers. The book-stalls were covered with tracts on the sacredness of hereditary right, on the omnipotence of Parlia ment, on the dangers of a disputed succession, and on the dangers of a Popish reign. It was in the midst of this ferment that Temple took his seat, for the first time, in the House of Commons.

The occasion was a very great one. His talents, his long experience of affairs, his un spotted public character, the high posts which he had filled, seemed to mark him out as a man on whom much would depend. He acted like himself. He saw that, if he supported the Ea clusion, he made the king and the heir-pre sumptive his enemies; and that, if he opposed

it, he made himself an object of hatred to the unscrupulous and turbulent Shaftesbury. He neither supported nor opposed it. He quietly absented himself from the House. Nay, he took care, he tells us, never to discuss the question in any society whatever. Lawrence Hyde, afterwards Earl of Rochester, asked him why he did not attend in his place. Temple replied that he acted according to Solomon's advice, neither to oppose the mighty, nor go about to stop the current of a river. The advice, whatever its value may be, is not to be found either in the canonical or apocryphal writings ascribed to Solomon. But Temple was much in the habit of talking about books which he had never read; and one of those books, we are afraid, was his Bible. Hyde answered, "You are a wise and a quiet man." And this might be true. But surely such wise and quiet men have no call to be members of Parliament in critical times.

A single session was quite enough for Temple. When the Parliament was dissolved, and another summoned at Oxford, he obtained an audience of the king, and begged to know whether his majesty wished him to continue in Parliament. Charles, who had a singularly | quick eye for the weaknesses of all who came near him, had no doubt seen through and through Temple, and rated the parliamentary support of so cool and guarded a friend at its proper value. He answered good-naturedly, but we suspect a little contemptuously, "I doubt, as things stand, your coming into the House will not do much good. I think you may as well let it alone." Sir William accordingly informed his constituents that he should not again apply for their suffrages; and set off for Sheen, resolving never again to meddle with public affairs. He soon found that the king was displeased with him. Charles, indeed, in his usual easy way, protested that he was not angry, not at all. But in a few days he struck Temple's name out of the list of privy councillors. Why this was done Temple declares himself unable to comprehend. But surely it hardly required his long and extensive converse with the world to teach him that there are conjunctures when men think that all who are not with them are against them,--that there are conjunctures when a lukewarm friend, who will not put himself the least out of his way, who will make no exertion, who will run no risk, is more distasteful than an enemy. Charles had hoped that the fair character of Temple would add credit to an unpopular and suspected government. But his majesty soon found that this fair character resembled pieces of furniture which we have seen in the drawing-rooms of very precise old ladies, which are a great deal too white to be used. This exceeding niceness was altogether out of season. Neither party wanted a man who was afraid of taking a part, of incurring abuse, of making enemies. There were probably many good and moderate men who would have hailed the appearance of a respectable mediator. But Temple was not a ruediator. He was merely a neutral.

He had about fifteen hundred a year, besides the Mastership of the Rolls in Ireland; an office in which he had succeeded his father, and which was then a mere sinecure for life, requiring no residence. His reputation both as a negotiator and a writer stood high. He resolved to be safe, to enjoy himself, and to let the world take its course; and he kept his resolution.

Darker times followed. The Oxford Parliament was dissolved. The Tories were triumphant. A terrible vengeance was inflicted on the chiefs of the Opposition. Temple learned in his retreat the disastrous fate of several of his old colleagues in Council. Shaftesbury fled to Holland. Russell died on the scaffold. Essex added a yet sadder and more fearful story to the bloody chronicles of the Tower. Monmouth clung in agonies of supplication round the knees of the stern uncle whom he had wronged, and tasted a bitterness worse than that of death,

the bitterness of knowing that he had humbled himself in vain. A tyrant trampled on the liberties and religion of the realm. The national spirit swelled high under the oppression. Disaffection spread even to the strongholds of loyalty,-to the cloisters of Westminster, to the schools of Oxford, to the guardroom of the household troops, to the very hearth and bedchamber of the sovereign. But the troubles which agitated the whole society did not reach the quiet orangery in which Temple loitered away several years without once seeing the smoke of London. He now and then appeared in the circle at Richmond or Windsor. But the only expressions which he is recorded to have used during those perilous times, were that he would be a good subject, but that he had done with politics.

The Revolution came. Temple remained strictly neutral during the short struggle; and then transferred to the new settlement the same languid sort of loyalty which he had felt for his former masters. He paid court to William at Windsor, and William dined with him at Sheen. But in spite of the most pressing solicitations, he refused to become Secretary of State. The refusal evidently proceeded only from his dislike of trouble and danger; and not, as some of his admirers would have us believe, from any scruple of conscience or honour. For he consented that his son should take the office of Secretary at War under the new sovereigns. That unfortunate young man destroyed himself within a week after his appointment, from vexation at finding that his advice had led the king into some improper steps with regard to Ireland. He seems to have inherited his father's extreme sensibility to failure; without that singular prudence which kept his father out of all situations in which any serious failure was to be apprebended. The blow fell heavy on the family. They retired in deep dejection to Moor Park, which they now preferred to Sheen, on account of the greater distance from London. In that spot, then very secluded, Temple passed the remainder

At last, however, he had escaped from pub- Mr. Courtenay (vol. ii. p. 160) confounds Moor Park lic life, and found himself at liberty to follow in Surrey, where Temple resided, with the Moor Park in Hertfordshire, which he praises in the essay on Garhis favourite pursuits. His fortune was easy.dening.

of his life. The air agreed with him. The | Yet in justice to Temple we must say, that soil was fruitful, and well suited to an experi- there is no reason to think that Swift was more mental farmer and gardener. The grounds unhappy at Moor Park than he would have been were laid out with the angular regularity in a similar situation under any roof in Engwhich Sir William had admired in the flower-land. We think also that the obligations which beds of Haarlem and the Hague. A beautiful the mind of Swift owed to that of Temple were rivulet, flowing from the hills of Surrey, bound- not inconsiderable. Every judicious reader ed the domain. But a straight canal which, must be struck by the peculiarities which disbordered by a terrace, intersected the garden, tinguish Swift's political tracts from all similar was probably more admired by the lovers of works produced by mere men of letters. Let the picturesque in that age. The house was any person compare, for example, the conduct small, but neat and well furnished;-the of the Allies, or the Letter to the October Club, neighbourhood very thinly peopled. Temple with Johnson's False Alarm, or Taxation no had no visiters, except a few friends who were Tyranny, and he will be at once struck by the willing to travel twenty or thirty miles in difference of which we speak. He may possiorder to see him; and now and then a foreigner bly think Johnson a greater man than Swift. whom curiosity brought to have a look at the He may possibly prefer Johnson's style to author of the Triple Alliance. Swift's. But he will at once acknowledge that Johnson writes like a man who has never been out of his study. Swift writes like a man who has passed his whole life in the midst of public business, and to whom the most important affairs of state are as familiar as his weekly bills.

Here, in May, 1694, died Lady Temple. From the time of her marriage we know little of her, except that her letters were always greatly admired, and that she had the honour to correspond constantly with Queen Mary. Lady Giffard, who, as far as appears, had always been on the best terms with her sisterin-law, still continued to live with Sir William.

But there were other inmates of Moor Park to whom a far higher interest belongs. An eccentric, uncouth, disagreeable, young Irishman, who had narrowly escaped plucking at Dublin, attended Sir William as an amanuensis, for twenty pounds a year and his board, dined at the second table, wrote bad verses in praise of his employer, and made love to a very pretty, dark-eyed young girl, who waited on Lady Giffard. Little did Temple imagine that the coarse exterior of his dependant concealed a genius equally suited to politics and to letters; a genius destined to shake great kingdoms, to stir the laughter and the rage of millions, and to leave to posterity memorials which can perish only with the English language. Little did he think that the flirtation in his servants' hall, which he perhaps scarcely deigned to make the subject of a jest, was the beginning of a long unprosperous love, which was to be as widely famed as the passion of Petrarch, or of Abelard. Sir William's secretary was Jonathan Swift-Lady Giffard's waiting-maid was poor Stella.

"Turn him to any cause of policy,

The Gordian knot of it he will unloose,
Familiar as his garter."

The difference, in short, between a political pamphlet by Johnson, and a political pamphlet by Swift, is as great as the difference between an account of a battle by Doctor Southey and the account of the same battle by Colonel Napier. It is impossible to doubt that the superiority of Swift is to be, in a great measure, attributed to his long and close connection with Temple.

Indeed, remote as the alleys and flower-pots of Moor Park were from the haunts of the busy and the ambitious, Swift had ample opportunities of becoming acquainted with the hidden causes of many great events. William was in the habit of consulting Temple, and occasionally visited him. Of what passed between them very little is known. It is certain, however, that when the Triennial Bill had been carried through the two Houses, his majesty, who was exceedingly unwilling to pass it, sent the Earl of Portland to learn Temple's opinion. Whether Temple thought the bill in itself a good one does not appear; but he clearly saw how imprudent it must be in a prince, situated as William was, to engage in an altercation with his Parliament; and directed Swift to draw up a paper on the subject, which, however, did not convince the king.

Swift retained no pleasing recollections of Moor Park. And we may easily suppose a situation like his to have been intolerably painful to a mind haughty, irascible, and conscious of pre-eminent ability. Long after, when he stood in the Court of Requests with a circle of gartered peers round him, or punned The chief amusement of Temple's declining and rhymed with cabinet ministers over Secre- years was literature. After his final retreat tary St. John's Mount-Pulciano, he remembered, from business, he wrote his very agreeable with deep and sore feeling, how miserable he memoirs; corrected and transcribed many of used to be for days together when he suspected his letters; and published several miscella that Sir William had taken something ill. He neous treatises, the best of which, we think, is could hardly believe that he, the same Swift that on Gardening. The style of his essays is, who chid the Lord Treasurer, rallied the Cap-on the whole, excellent,—almost always pleas tain General, and confronted the pride of the ing, and now and then stately and splendid Duke of Buckinghamshire with pride still The matter is generally of much less value; as more inflexible, could be the same being who our readers will readily believe when we inhad passed nights of sleepless anxiety, in form them that Mr. Courtenay-a biograpner, musing over a cross look or a testy word of a-that is to say, a literary vassal, bound by the patron. "Faith," he wrote to Stella, with bitter levity "Sir William spoiled a fine gentleman."

immemorial law of his tenure to render ho mage, aids, reliefs, and all other customary

services to his lord,-avows that he cannot | in tolerable order by his discretion, now, when give an opinion about the essay on "Heroic he had long lived in seclusion, and had become Virtue," because he cannot read it without accustomed to regard himself as by far the first skipping; a circumstance which strikes us man of his circle, rendered him blind to his as peculiarly strange, when we consider how own deficiencies. In an evil hour he publong Mr. Courtenay was at the India Board, lished an "Essay on Ancient and Modern and how many thousand paragraphs of the Learning." The style of this treatise is very copious official eloquence of the East he must good-the matter ludicrous and contemptible have perused. to the last degree. There we read how Lycur gus travelled into India, and brought the Spartan laws from that country-how Orpheus and Museus made voyages in search of knowledge, and how Orpheus attained to a depth of learn

One of Sir William's pieces, however, deserves notice, not, indeed, on account of its intrinsic merit, but on account of the light which it throws on some curious weaknesses of his character; and on account of the extra-ing which has made him renowned in all sucordinary effect which it produced on the republic of letters.

In the midst of all this vast mass of absurdity ness had been increased by many years of seone paragraph stands out pre-eminent. The clusion and flattery,-was moved to the most doctrine of Temple-not a very comfortable violent resentment; complained, very unjustone—is, that the human race is constantly de- ly, of Bentley's foul-mouthed raillery, and de generating; and that the oldest books in every clared that he had commenced an answer, but kind are the best. In confirmation of this doc- had laid it aside, "having no mind to enter the trine, he remarks that the Fables of Esop are lists with such a mean, dull, unmannerly pe the best fables, and the letters of Phalaris the dant." Whatever may be thought of the tembest letters in the world. On the merit of the per which Sir William showed on this occaletters of Phalaris he dwells with great warmth sion, we cannot too highly applaud his discreand with extraordinary felicity of language. tion in not finishing and publishing his answer, Indeed, we could hardly select a more favour- which would certainly have been a most exable specimen of the graceful and easy ma-traordinary performance. jesty to which his style sometimes rises than this unlucky passage. He knows, he says, that some learned men, or men who pass for learned, such as Politian, have doubted the genuineness of these letters. But of these doubts he speaks with the greatest contempt. Now it is perfectly certain, first, that the letters are very bad; secondly, that they are spurious; and thirdly, that, whether they be bad or good, spurious or genuine, Temple could know nothing of the matter; inasmuch as he was no mor able to construe a line of them than to dec.pher an Egyptian obelisk.

This Essay, silly as it is, was exceedingly well received, both in England and on the Continent. And the reason is evident. The classical scholars, who saw its absurdity, were generally on the side of the ancients, and were inclined rather to veil than to expose the blunders of an ally; the champions of the moderns were generally as ignorant as Temple himself; and the multitude were charmed by his flowing and melodious diction. He was doomed, however, to smart, as he well deserved, for his vanity and folly.

He was not, however, without defenders. Like Hector, when struck down prostrate by Ajax, he was in an instant covered by a thick crowd of shields

་་ ουτις εδυνήσατο ποιμένα λαών Οντασαι ουδε βαλειν πριν γαρ περίβησαν αριστοί, Πουλυδάμας τε, και Αινείας, και διος ̓Αγηνωρ, Σαρπηδων τ' αρχος Λυκίων, και Γλαυκος αμύμων."

Christchurch was up in arms; and though that college seems then to have been almost destitute of severe and accurate learning, no academical society could show a greater array of orators, wits, politicians,―bustling adventurers, who united the superficial accomplishments of the scholar with the manners and arts of the man of the world, and this formidable body resolved to try how far smart repartees, well turned sentences, confidence, puffing, and intrigue could, on the question whether a Greek book were or were not genuine, supply the place of a little knowledge of Greek.

Out came the reply to Bentley, bearing the name of Boyle, but in truth written by Atterbury, with the assistance of Smalridge and Christchurch at Oxford was then widely and others. A most remarkable book it is, and justly celebrated as a place where the lighter often reminds us of Goldsmith's observation, parts of classical learning were cultivated that the French would be the best cooks in the with success. With the deeper mysteries of world if they had any butcher's meat, for that philology neither the instructors nor the pupils they can make ten dishes out of a nettle top. had the smallest acquaintance. They fancied It really deserves the praise, whatever that themselves Scaligers, as Bentley scornfully praise may be worth, of being the best book said, as soon as they could write a copy of ever written by any man on the wrong side of Latin verses with only two or three small a question of which he was profoundly igno faults. From this college proceeded a new rant. The learning of the confederacy is that edition of the Letters of Phalaris, which were of a schoolboy, and not of an extraordinary rare, and had been in request since the appear- schoolboy; but it is used with the skill and ance of Temple's Essay. The nominal editor address of most able, artful, and experienced was Charles Boyle, a young man of noblemen; it is beaten out to the very thinnest leaf, family and promising parts; but some older and is disposed in such a way as to seem ten members of the society lent their assistance. times larger than it is. The dexterity with While this work was in preparation, an idle which they avoid grappling with those parts quarrel, occasioned, it should seem, by the of the subject with which they know themnegligence and misrepresentations of a book-selves to be incompetent to deal is quite wonseller, arose between Boyle and the king's derful. Now and then, indeed, they commit librarian, Richard Bentley. Boyle, in the pre- disgraceful blunders, for which old Busby, unface to his edition, inserted a bitter reflection der whom they had studied, would have whipon Bentley. Bentley revenged himself by ped them all round. But this circumstance proving that the Epistles of Phalaris were for- only raises our opinion of the talents which geries; and in his remarks on this subject made such a fight with such scanty means. treated Temple, not indecently, but with no Let our readers, who are not acquainted with great reverence. the controversy, imagine a Frenchman who had acquired just English enough to read the Spectator with a dictionary, coming forward to defend the genuineness of "Rowley s Poems" against Percy and Farmer; and they will have some notion of the feat which Atterbury had

Temple, who was quite unaccustomed to any but the most respectful usage, who, even while engaged in politics, had always shrunk from all rude collision, and had generally succeeded in avoiding it, and whose sensitive