strong expression of disrespect towards the Prince, he was induced to dismiss by far his ablest supporter, and take that wily old Scotchman as his minister.

There was the usual amount of royal perfidy in the manner of his dismissal, and not much more. At night he squeezed his hand, and expressed his regard for the man whom in the morning he dismissed by a civil message requiring the seals of his office, and renewing his protestations of gratitude for his services, and of confidence in his attachment. Bolingbroke appears to have felt this deeply. He instantly left the party, and for ever; but he affects to say that he had previously taken the determination of retiring from all connexion with the service as soon as the attempt of 1715 should be made and should fail. Assuming this to be true, which it probably is not, he admits that his course was to depend, not on any merits of the Stuart cause, not on any view of British interests, not on any vain, childish, romantic notions of public duty and its dictates, but simply upon his own personal convenience, which was alone to be consulted, and which was to exact his retirement unless the dynasty were restored-which was, of course, to sanction his continuance in the service in the event of success crowning the Prince, and enabling Bolingbroke to be minister of England. But whatever might have been his intentions in the event of the Pretender retaining him as his Secretary of State, his dismissal produced an instantaneous effect. All regard for the cause which he had made his own was lost in the revenge for his deprivation of place under its chief; and he lost not a moment in reconciling himself with the party whom he had betrayed, and deserted, and opposed. To obtain an amnesty for the present, and the possibility of promotion hereafter, no professions of contrition were too humble, no promises of amendment too solemn, no display of zeal for the Government which he had done his utmost to destroy too extravagant. To a certain extent he was believed, because the Pretender's cause was now considered desperate, and Bolingbroke's interest coincided with the duty of performing his promise. To a certain extent, therefore, his suit was successful, and he was suffered to return home and resume his property with his rank; but the doors of Parliament and

office were kept closed against him, and the rest of his life was spent in unavailing regrets that he had ever left his country, and as unavailing rancour against the great and honest minister who had shown him mercy without being his dupe-who had allowed him to make England a dwelling-place once more, without letting him make it once more the sport of his unprincipled ambition.

Here, again, regarding his final abandonment of the Pretender, we have his own account, and on that alone we are condemning him. Because the Parliament of the Brunswicks attainted him when he confessed his guilt by his flight, he joined the standard of the Stuarts. It was covered with irremediable defeat, and he resolved to quit it. But meanwhile the master into whose service he came as a volunteer chose to take another minister: therefore Bolingbroke deserted him, and deserted him when his misfortunes were much more unquestionable than his ingratitude. The pivot of all his actions, by all that he urges in his own behalf, was his individual, private, personal interest. To this consideration all sense of principle was sacrificed, all obligation of duty subjected; whatever his revenge prompted, whatever his ambition recommended, that he deemed himself justified in doing, if not called upon to do.

Bolingbroke's Idea of a Patriot King' certainly differed exceedingly from his idea of a Patriot Subject. The duty of the former, according to him, required a constant sacrifice of his own interests to the good of his country; the duty of the latter he considered to be a constant sacrifice of his country to himself. The one was bound on no account ever to regard either his feelings or his tastes, the interests of his family, or the powers of his station; the other was justified in regarding his own gratification, whether of caprice, or revenge, or ambition, as the only object of his life. Between the ruler and his subjects there was in this view no kind of reciprocity; for all the life of selfsacrifice spent by the one was to be repaid by a life of undisturbed and undisguised self-seeking in the other. But if the guarantee which his system proposed to afford for the performance of the patriot king's duties, or for making patriots of kings, was somewhat scanty and precarious, not to say fantastical, ample security was held out for the

patriot citizen's part being well filled. The monarch was enticed to a right and moderate use of power by clothing him with prerogative, and trusting rather to that not being abused than to influence not being very extravagantly employed; the secret for moderating the love of dominion was to bestow it without any restraint; the protection given to the people against the prerogative of the prince was to deliver them over into his hands; the method proposed for putting the wolf out of conceit with blood was to throw the lamb to him bound. If this did not seem a very hopeful mode of attaining the object, a very likely way to realize the Idea of a Patriot King,' the plan for producing Patriot Citizens in unlimited supply was abundantly certain. Whatever defects the one scheme might disclose in the knowledge of human nature, whatever ignorance of human frailty, none whatever could be charged upon the other; for it appealed to the whole selfish feelings of the soul, made each man the judge of what was most virtuous for him to do, and to guide his judgment furnished him with a pleasing canon enough--he had only to follow his own inclinations whithersoever they might lead. Such was the system of Bolingbroke upon the relative duties of sovereigns and subjects a system somewhat more symmetrically unfolded as regards the former; but, touching the latter, fully exemplified by his practice, and also plainly sketched by his writings composed in his own defence. For it must never be forgotten that he is not like most men who have gone astray by refusing to practise what they preach, or proving unequal to square their own conduct by the rules which in general they confess to be just. His conduct has been openly and deliberately vindicated by himself upon the ground that all he did, at least all he admitted himself to have done, he was justified in doing; and he has confessed himself to have acted in every particular with an undeviating regard to the pursuit of his own interests and the gratification of his own passions.

Of Bolingbroke's private life and personal qualities, as apart from his public and political, little needs be added. He who bore the part in affairs which we have been contemplating could not easily have been a man of strict integrity, or of high principle in any relation of life. There

may have been nothing mean or sordid in his nature; an honesty, seldom tried in persons of his station, may have been proof against the common temptations to which it was exposed; the honour which worldly men make their god may have found in him a submissive worshipper; but the more exalted and the nobler qualities of the soul were not likely to be displayed by one whose selfish propensities were gratified in public life at the cost of all that statesmen most regard in public character; and little reliance can be placed either on the humanity, or the self-control, or the self-respect of one whose passions are his masters, and hurry him on to gratification at all the hazards that virtue can encounter. Accordingly his youth was a course of unrestrained and habitual indulgence. In a libertine age he was marked as among the most licentious. Even his pro

fessed panegyrist, Dean Swift, makes no defence for this part of his life, and only ventures to suggest that he had lived long enough to regret and repent of it. Sir William Windham, too, fell into such courses, carried away by his example, and seduced by the charms of his society: and they who have written of him ascribe his early dissipation to the ascendant of such a Mentor. That he survived this tempest of the passions many years, and became more quiet in his demeanour during the calmness of his blood, is perhaps more the result of physical causes than any great eulogy of his returning virtue, or any manifestation of his penitence.

That his feelings, however, when left to their natural course, unperverted by evil associates, nor hurried by evil propensities, were kind and generous, there is sufficient proof. The marriage which in early youth he first contracted was one of accident and of family arrangement: like all such unions, it was attended with little happiness. The second wife was one of his choice: to her his demeanour was blameless, and he enjoyed much comfort in her society. His attachment to his friends was warm and zealous; and they cultivated and looked up to him with a fervour which can ill be expressed by such ordinary words as esteem, or respect, or even admiration. Yet even in this relation, the most attractive in which he appears to us, his proud temper got the better of his kinder nature; and he persecuted the

memory of Pope, whom living he had loved so well, with a rancour hardly to be palliated, certainly not to be vindicated, by the paltry trick to which that great poet and little man had lent himself, in an underhand publication of the manuscripts confided to his care.

His spirit was high and manly; his courage, personal and political, was without a stain. He had no sordid propensities; his faults were not mean or paltry; they were, both in his private life and his public, on a large scale, creating, for the most part, wonder or terror more than scorn or contempt-though his conduct towards the Pretender approached near an exception to this remark; and the restless impatience with which he bore his long exclusion from the great stage of public affairs, and the relentless vengeance with which he, in consequence of this exclusion, pursued Walpole as its cause, betokened anything rather than greatness of soul.

That the genius which he displayed in the senate, his wisdom, his address, his resources in council, should, when joined to fascinating manners and literary accomplishments, have made him shine in society without a rival, can easily be comprehended. So great an orator, so noble a person in figure and in demeanour, one so little under the dominion of the principle which makes men harsh, and the restraints which render their manners formal-was sure to captivate all superficial observers, and even to win the more precious applause of superior minds. To do that which he did so well naturally pleased him; to give delight was itself delightful; and he indulged in the more harmless relaxations of society long after he had ceased to be a partaker in the less reputable pleasures of polished life. He probably left as high a reputation behind him, among the contemporaries of his maturer years, for his social qualities, which remained by him to the last, as he had gained with those who remembered the eloquence that in his earlier days shook the senate, or the policy and intrigues that had also shaken the monarchy itself. The dreadful malady under which he long lingered, and at length sunk-a cancer in the face-he bore with exemplary fortitude, a fortitude drawn from the natural resources of his vigorous mind, and unhappily not aided by the consolations of any religion;