was quietly preparing the downfal of the ministry. All those complicated forces implied in the Greek Nemesis-the supernatural principle of envy of all self-confident prosperity-were at work to overset this too strong cabinet. There was haughtiness and ingratitude, real or supposed, to a host of adherents, who were for the most part no genuine Whigs, but scenters of the carcase of patronage-a crowd, which, as comprehending all would-be placemen, could hardly complain with reason of not being all gratified with lucrative offices. There was a growing discontent at the burdens of taxation, which, as the condition of Marlborough's grandeur, Sunderland and Godolphin felt themselves pledged to sustain. Harley, who knew by instinct all the ins and outs of faction, nursed this increasing disaffection. He hoped to be enabled to turn it to account by means of the naturally anti-Whig prejudices of the Queen, now exasperated and roused by the capricious insolence of Lady Marlborough. Again, St. John had only a subsidiary part in this long and dexterous extra-parliamentary campaign. When the object was to seduce from a rival the affections of his partisans, never existed, as Harley found to his cost, a more incomparable intriguer than he. He possessed, in perfection, the chamelion, or Mephistopheles-like capacity of displaying himself in the aspect most attractive to each man's peculiar temperament. But it is one thing to win over an individual, another to have grown by long study and habituation so morbidly sensitive to every thrill and throb of national or party feeling, as to be able to predict infallibly the direction which a popular movement will take. Harley was sole undertaker' for opposition. But it was not till the impeachment of Sacheverell for impugning the doctrines of the Revolution, and calling the Lord Treasurer 'Volpone,' that the secret interviews of Anne with him were renewed. The latter was at his country seat, and at table, when news came of the rash step to which ministers had committed themselves. He set off for London the same hour. The Whigs found that they had indeed, in St. John's language, burnt their fingers in trying to roast a priest. Hardly could the managers, Boyle, Smith, Walpole, and Stanhope, prevail with the House of Peers, the natural stronghold of the Revolution, to impose a sentence of two years' suspension. The Doctor employed the beginning of his leisure in solemnly visiting all the churches of the metropolis, to offer up thanks for his virtual deliverance. Bonfires, and addresses, and civic banquets (not that the great seat of the moneyed interest could be aught at heart but Whig), shouts, and substantial presents, proclaimed the dormant strength of the party, which the semblance of a Tory element in the Government, in the person of Godolphin, had lulled to sleep.

Jealousy of the Dutch, our rivals in commerce and in the Protestant confederacy, and suspicion of a subsidizing foreign policy, were the common ground on which the nation met the party. The cry raised was loud enough to overbalance, for a time, the gratification of the people's pride from the sweets of military glory after the dreary interval of William's campaigns. Harley's time was come. Not a High-Churchman at heart, he had ever found matter for sarcasm in Harcourt's interpretation of the sermon, as an exposition of the doctrine of non-resistance to the two Houses of the Legislature, the true sovereign power in the State. His feeling to the man was no more friendly than to his discourse. Swift says of Sacheverell, April, 1711: 'He 'hates the new ministry mortally, and they hate him and pre'tend to despise him too. They will not allow him to have 'been the occasion of the late change.' His words in public conveyed a different impression, as did also his suggestions to the Queen.

The scheme of government which he laid before her was both in itself plausible, as everything which originated with Harley, and most dexterously adapted to her peculiar temperament. She had naturally a great jealousy of the appearance of subservience. The new fact in the English constitution of the necessity of choosing a Ministry wholly from one party, conveyed no idea to her mind. It seemed to her, naturally enough, to reduce the sovereign from a personally influential agent to the condition of a mere organ for registering the results of a party contest. Her secret adviser recommended an administration chosen on a different principle, men influential indeed in the Houses, yet not chosen in the mass for their party prominence, but selected, from this party one, and from that section another, according to the character of the departments which they were required to fill. The plan was plausible enough. It was in time to come St. John's plan. It has been the plan of all oppositions, when struggling against the seemingly irresistible power of a party in possession. But the Queen's extreme aversion to all connected with the then Ministry, Cowper and the Somersets excepted, doomed the scheme at once, however well suited to her own theory of the royal prerogative. Otherwise, with the precedent before the eyes of the Whigs, of their own facility of ejecting men of opposite views from the Godolphin cabinet, the first experiment must have demonstrated the impracticability--the superintending control of Parliament once acknowledged-of carrying on a Government without reciprocal confidence in the members of it. The dread of a colleague's Parliamentary manœuvres and intrigues must have vitiated all unison of operation. Doubtless, with no very sublime or patriotic design of

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destroying party rancour, but with the less exalted love of coalitions-a radical feature in all his policy-and the hope of warding off the violence of the Whigs, or even the vehemence of the undisciplined Toryism, of which he seems to have conceived an instinctive dread, he did make the attempt. Lord Cowper and Walpole emphatically repulsed his overtures. vain did the First Lord insinuate that a Whig game was intended at bottom.' The Chancellor declares in his diary that he saw how shuffling were all Harley's explanations, and that, in a little time, when any Tory of interest would press for the place, he must have it.' Probably the prejudice against the new minister's candour made Cowper unjust. It was certainly Harley's constant policy to temper the Tories with the Whigs, lest he should become an instrument of Jacobite intrigues. But as well was their policy of an opposite sort, as it was impossible for St. John and Walpole to continue to serve together.

In fact, after a flourish of trumpets in the dismissal of some subordinates, Godolphin closed the pageant of Harley's triumph with the surrender of his beloved white staff. Marlborough lingered yet, but his fall was the slow but sure consequence of the overthrow of his connexions. The Treasury was put in commission, the conqueror being head of the Board. Rochester, as President of the Council, in the absence of a lord treasurer, was in rank Premier; and St. John assumed, with a Secretaryship of State, his historical position, as a statesman, and no longer the mere occasional orator.

The suddenness of St. John's elevation to be the most marked man in the kingdom, dazzles the student of history. He had spoken often, and with effect; he had discharged the duties committed to him with zeal and tact; but he was never looked upon but as the follower of Harley, rising and falling with him. Even the revolution, by which his promotion was achieved, was not of his planning. To his chief the honour belonged, if honour there were, and yet St. John reaped the lion's share of the profit. He had been lost in a party; the nation resounded with the voice of the Cabinet Minister, and Europe, for half a century, felt the effects of his policy. Harley knew better than any man how to beguile political partisans by adapting himself to weaknesses. St. John compelled their adhesion from admiration. The one could never lead a party boldly and decidedly; the other could never collect a party; but he was made to be the spirit and soul of one already formed. The wit and originality of conception, which only provoked fear in his adversaries, gave confidence to friends. Few joined his ranks convinced by his acts or arguments, but, once gathered round him, they

could not admit a single thought of secession or mistrust; yet he did not entrench himself in the camp of Toryism. This was not recognised as the national policy. Whig principles were alone constitutional, Whig statesmen the only authorized interpreters of the Constitution. The aim and object of the Harley cabinet was to impugn the deductions from the one, and the integrity of the others, without actually attacking the premises on which the inferences were based, and on which the men acted. St. John was an instrument in carrying out this policy, and by the aid of the press; but his aim was higher and more independent. In that aim is to be found the link between his Toryism and Radicalism-that subtle bond of connexion which so often escapes those who set out with the assumption that Toryism and Conservatism are identical. Shaftesbury was by turns a Republican and a Tory, and we shall see that the royalist St. John could recognise, at one time, an obligation in the sovereign to consult the popular will on every occasion; at another, to govern his territories according to the absolute bias of his own, and that both theories flowed from the same mental character. The dislike to a vexatious oligarchy is an original sentiment in certain minds, and no invention of Mr. Disraeli's imagination. St. John appealed from the mechanical force, as it were, of great lords, among whom it enraged him that he was not himself counted, to the individual majesty of the sovereign, and the collective majesty of the people. Thus it was not the capriciousness of a disposition ever attempting innovation for the sake of showing its dexterity, which inspired his peculiar political career. It was not even disgust at the cold disdainfulness of the Whartons and the Churchills, trusting in their pocket-boroughs. It was rather hatred of that policy which makes a man the mere instrument for carrying out traditionary measures, the projects of a faction, which the faction itself can hardly account for on plausible selfish motives, but has taken up simply because their party always did so. As in some degree his natural genius fitted him for the work, so his feelings moved him to adopt that cause in which he would be most of a real agent-the organ, it might be, of a monarch; it might be, of a democracy, but, at all events, at liberty to adopt original plans.

In mere numbers the Tories probably exceeded the Whigs; but those men of all classes who take their opinions on trust, and who, in fact, constitute the majority in every people, thought, however they might feel, with the latter. The Whigs had achieved the Revolution; in that the doctrines of their adversaries had been defeated and renounced by the nation. To win over the neutrality of this multitude-to secure, not their incor

poration in the Ministerial, but their defection from the opposite party-was the object of the eager patronage now extended to literature. From this scheme of action the characteristic lustre of the last four years of the reign is derived, contrasted as they are by the neighbourhood of Walpole's administration. Now especially, not a few isolated exceptions, as Addison and Montague, among writers, were caressed by cabinets; all were accepted as, of right, equals in society, by their employers and patrons. Literary men of the same political opinions were courted for the aid they brought, and, if of different, for the harm they might do, and out of compliment to the profession to which partisans belonged. Not only were Prior and Swift reckoned high among statesmen, but Steele retained his Commissionership, and Addison was always an honoured guest of St. John's. Authors felt a sort of pride at seeing politicians ambitious of a high place in their fraternity, which called out a spirit and manifest consciousness of power over affairs, unknown in the days of Charles II. The sight of so much versatility, equality in literature, and prominence in that practical faculty of ruling men, which unpractical men appreciate so intensely, made professional writers at once sworn advocates of the policy of such statesmen, and protectors of their fame. Robertson attributes the most unwarrantable glory of Francis, as contrasted with the very indifferent reputation of his rival the Emperor Charles, to his zealous patronage of letters. The vitality of the name of St. John may at least equally be charged to the openness with which he acknowledged the power of literature, and the manner in which he conciliated the admiration of its professors by his own devotion to the art.

The high rank maintained by the reign of Anne, as the Augustan age of English literature, will be found to be connected with the favour shown to authors by the minister on whose subsequent fame the celebrity of some of them has so signally reacted. A necessary condition to the promotion of any especial epoch to this rank, is a high state, not of caste, but of national culture; that state in which a whole people is able clearly to appreciate a production, and in proportion to the natural distinctions of social grade. Then only will the author write so as to move a nation, when his countrymen are in a condition to be stirred profoundly by him; and then only will the spirit of a nation be so changed or modified by the influence of mind, that it can become a cause reproducing a like effect in the minds of after generations. When in such circumstances great authors do arise, as great authors surely will (for a people at all stages of its civilization has about the same quantity of the raw material of genius waiting to be wrought and rough-hewn), they