Harley and Mrs. Masham from this time intrigued till the government was really in their hands. For her part in these transactions, her husband was included in the twelve peers made in 1712, and Abigail now became Lady Masham. After the death of Anne, she lived in retirement till her decease in 1734. Hallam in speaking of these two remarkable women says, "It is rather a humiliating proof of the sway which the feeblest prince enjoys even in a limited monarchy, that the fortunes of Europe should have been changed by nothing more noble than the insolence of one waiting-woman, and the cunning of another. It is true that this was effected by throwing the weight of the crown into the scale of a powerful faction; yet the house of Bourbon would probably not have reigned beyond the Pyrenees, but for Sarah and Abigail at queen Anne's toilet."

ROBERT HARLEY, EARL OF OXFORD. 1661-1724. Robert Harley descended from an ancient family of Hereford; his grandfather was master of the Mint to Charles I. and his father governor of Dunkirk after the Restoration. The Harleys were formerly considered one of the heads of the Presbyterian party, and took the field on the side of the parliament in the early part of the civil war, but when the Independents gained the ascendancy, they changed sides and helped to bring about the Restoration. At the time of the Revolution, Robert and his father raised a troop of horse and took possession of Worcester for the Prince of Orange. After the accession of William, Harley sat in the House supporting the Whig principles of his family, but in a while he hesitated, and then passed over to the Tory side. By that party he was three times elected to the Speaker's chair. In 1704, he was made secretary of state, through the influence it is said of Abigail Hill, to whom he had rendered service in recom mending her to the favorable notice of Samuel Masham, the object of her affections. Four years later, Harley was obliged to resign in consequence of the treason of one of his clerks.

On the fall of the Whigs in 1710, Harley was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the year following created a peer. A few days after he was appointed Lord Treasurer, and so continued till within three days of the end of the reign, when he was dismissed through the influence of his former patron, whose hate he had excited by a want of readiness in securing to her a handsome annuity granted by the queen. It is unnecessary to repeat the part taken by Harley in the peace of Utrecht, for which both he and Bolingbroke were impeached in 1715. After being imprisoned two years in the Tower, he was at his own request brought to trial before the Lords, the Commons not appearing to prosecute he was discharged. From this period he lived in retirement devoting himself to the collection of books and manuscripts. His collection of the latter was greatly enlarged by his son, and being purchased by the parliament, forms now the well-known Harleian collection in the British Museum. That he was the patron of literature is in favor of Harley, but he was a poor statesman, and like his contemporaries engaged in treacherous correspondence with the exiled Stuarts.

HENRY ST. JOHN, VISCOUNT BOLINGBROKE. 1678-1751. Henry was the son of Henry St. John of Battersea, and Mary, daughter of the Earl of Warwick. After an early education in the puritanical principles of his mother, he was sent to Eton, and thence to Christ

Church, Oxford. In 1701 he entered parliament, and attached himself to the Tory administration of Rochester and Godolphin. He was already intimate with Harley, and when his friend was made secretary of state, St. John was brought in as secretary at war, which post he retained till the formation of a Whig ministry in 1708. At the restoration of the Tories to power in 1710, he was made secretary of state, with the direction of foreign affairs. It was during this period of office, that he bore the chief part in negotiating the peace of Utrecht. In 1712 he was called to the House of Lords, and soon after a rivalry grew up between him and his old friend Harley; aided by Lady Masham he subsequently effected the removal of his rival. His purpose was now to form a cabinet of Jacobites and restore the exiled family, but the unexpected death of the queen, before the affair was ripe, rendered it abortive. In 1715 he was impeached, for his share in the peace, along with Harley, and being alarmed fled to the continent. The Pretender appointed him his secretary of state, from which post he was dismissed on the ground of neglect of duty. By means of a bribe of £11,000 to the Duchess of Kendal, the king's mistress, he received permission to return to England, which he did in 1724, and received back his property by grant of parliament, but not his peerage. Being shut out of parliament, he vented his temper against the ministry by means of the press. Bolingbroke was an extensive writer, but his works are now little read, neither it is said, is there much in them worth reading, for his knowledge was inaccurate, and his reasoning for the most part specious. His style is thought to have considerable merit, being a "happy medium between that of the scholar and that of the man of society". It may be added, that Bolingbroke was an unbeliever and a man of detestable private character.

JAMES FITZJAMES, DUKE OF BERWICK, 1670-1734. James Fitzjames was the natural son of James, Duke of York, by Arabella Churchill, sister to the Duke of Marlborough. At the age of seven he was sent to France, and educated in a college of the Jesuits; he returned to England about the time of his father's accession, and though a mere youth, led a charge of cavalry at Sedgemoor. In 1686 he set out for Vienna to serve against the Turks, and distinguished himself at the siege of Buda. The year following his father created him Duke of Berwick, and appointed him colonel of the Oxford Blues. After the Revolution he served with his father in Ireland, and when obliged to retire to the continent, he joined the French army against his uncle Marlborough, whose prisoner he became in 1693. In 1703, the Duke was naturalised as a subject of France, and appointed to the command of the French forces in Spain, from which country he was recalled in the next year. In 1706 he was made a marshal and again sent to command in Spain, where in the year following he won the decisive battle of Almanza, for which Philip created him Duke of Liria and Xerica. He afterwards served on the Rhine, in Flanders, and in 1709, in Provence and Dauphiny, in defending the frontiers against the Duke of Savoy. This defence against a superior force is considered a master piece of strategy. A long military career was ended by a cannon ball, which struck off his head, while engaged in the trenches at the siege of Philipsberg. Both the public and private character of the Duke are said to have

been exemplary. By his first wife, a daughter of the Earl of Clanricarde, he had one son to whom he tranferred his titles and estates in Spain; by his second wife he left children, the descendants of which hold the dukedom of Fitzjames in France, the title of Berwick having been dropped on the Duke's death in 1734.

FRANCOIS EUGENE, PRINCE OF SAVOY. 1663-1736. Francis Eugene was descended in the third degree from the ducal House of Savoy. His father was Count of Soissons, and Paris the place of his birth. Francis was educated for the church, but some wrong done to his family by Louis XIV. led him to enter the Imperial service, and renounce his allegiance to France. His first campaign was against the Turks at the siege of Vienna, in 1683, and such were his bravery and talent that in 1691 he commanded the Imperial forces in Piedmont. In 1697, in command of the army in Hungary, he won a great victory over the Turks at Zeuta. When the war of the Spanish Succession broke out, Eugene headed the Imperialists in Italy, and after various successes lost the battle of Luzara in 1702; he now returned to Vienna and was appointed president of the council of war. In 1704 he headed the Imperialists at Blenheim, and in 1706 won the decisive battle of Turin. He had a share in the victories of Oudenarde and Malplaquet. His next successes were against the Turks, whom he defeated at the celebrated battle of Peterwaradin in 1716, and in the year following obliged the enemy to surrender Belgrade. Eugene was as remarkable for modesty of character as for his ability as a general, the former as much as the latter contributed to the successes in the Succession War, for it rarely happens that two generals of pretty equal fame, work together as he and Marlborough did. Like Marlborough he originated no new tactics, but owed his success to quickness of perception, decision, and great skill in making the best of given circumstances.

MISCELLANEOUS NOTES.

OBJECTIONS MADE BY THE SCOTS TO THE UNION OF THE TWO COUNTRIES. Sir Walter Scott writes: "In Scotland it [the Union] was regarded with an almost universal feeling of discontent and dishonor. The Jacobite party, who had entertained great hopes of eluding the act for settling the kingdom upon the family of Hanover, beheld themselves entirely blighted; the Whigs or Presbyterians, found themselves forming part of a nation in which prelacy was an institution of the state; the Country party who had nourished a vain but honorable idea of maintaining the independence of Scotland, now saw it, with all its symbols of ancient sovereignty, sunk and merged under the government of England. All the different professions and classes of men, each saw something in the obnoxious treaty, which affected their own interest.

"The nobles of an ancient and proud land, which they were wont to manage at their pleasure, were now stripped of their legislative privilege, unless in so far as exercised, like the rights of a petty corporation, by a handful of delegates; the smaller barons and gentry shared their humiliation, their little band of representatives being too few, and their voices too feeble, to produce any weight in the British House of Commons, to which a small portion was admitted. The

clergy's apprehension for their own system of church discipline was sensitively awakened, and their frequent warnings from the pulpit kept the terror of innovation before their congregations.

The Scottish lawyers had equal reason for alarm. They witnessed what they considered as the degradation of their profession, and of the laws, to the exposition of which they had been brought up. They saw their supreme civil court, which had spurned at the idea of having their decrees reviewed even in the parliament, now subjected to appeal to the British House of Peers; a body who could be expected to know little of law at all, and in which the Chancellor, who presided, was trained in the jurisprudence of another country. Besides, when the septre departed from Scotland, and the lawgiver no longer sate at her feet, it was likely that her municipal regulations should be gradually assimilated to those of England, and that her lawyers should by degrees be laid aside and rendered useless, by the institutions of a foreign country which were strange to their studies. "The merchants and trading portion of Scotland also found grievances in the Union peculiar to themselves. The privileges which admitted the Scots into the colonial trade of England, only represented the apples of Tantalus, so long as local prejudices, want of stock, and all the difficulties incident to forcing capital into a new channel, or line of business, obstructed their benefitting by them. On the other hand they lost all the advantage of their foreign trade whenever the traffic became obstructed by the imposition of English duties. They lost, at the same time, a beneficial, though illicit trade, with England itself, which took place in consequence of foreign commodities being so much cheaper in Scotland. Lastly, the establishment of two boards of Customs and Excise, with the introduction of a shoal of officers, all Englishmen, and as it was said, frequently men of indifferent and loose character, was severely felt by the commercial part of the nation, whose poverty had hitherto kept them tolerably free from taxation.

"The tradesmen and citizens were injured in the tenderest point, by the general emigration of families of rank and condition, who naturally went to reside in London, not only to attend their duties in parliament, but to watch for those opportunities of receiving favors, which are only to be obtained by being constantly near the source of preferment; not to mention numerous families of consequence, who went to the metropolis merely for fashion's sake. This general emigration naturally drained Scotland of the income of the non-residents, who expended their fortunes among strangers, to the prejudice of those of their country folk, who had formerly lived by supplying them with necessaries or luxuries. The agricultural interest was equally affected by the scarcity of money, which the new laws, the money drawn by emigrants from their Scottish estates to meet the unwonted expenses of London, the decay of external commerce and of internal trade, all contributed to produce.

"Besides these peculiar grievances which affected certain classes or professions, the Scots felt generally the degradation, as they conceived it, of their country being rendered the subservient ally of the state, of which, though infinitely more powerful, they had resisted the efforts for the space of two thousand years. The poorest and meanest, as well as the richest and most noble, felt that he shared the national

honor; and the former was even more deeply interested in preserving it untarnished than the latter, because he had no dignity or consideration due to him personally or individually, beyond that which belonged to him as a native of Scotland.

"There was therefore nothing save discontent and lamentation to be heard throughout Scotland, and men of every class vented their complaints against the Union the more loudly, because the sense of personal grievances might be concealed and yet indulged under popufar declamations concerning the dishonor done to the country." MODERN OBJECTIONS TO THE TERMS OF THE UNION. It has not," Hallam remarks, "been unusual for Scotchmen, even in modern times, while they cannot but acknowledge the expediency of a Union, and the blessings which they have reaped from it, to speak of its conditions as less favorable than their ancestors ought to have claimed. For this, however, there does not seem much reason. The ratio of population would indeed have given Scotland about one-eighth of the legislative body, instead of something less than one-twelfth; but no government except the merest democracy is settled on the sole basis of numbers; and if the comparison of wealth and of public contribu tions was to be admitted, it may be thought that a country, which stipulated for itself to pay less than one-fortieth of direct taxation, was not entitled to a much greater share of the representation than it obtained. Combining the two ratios of population and property, there seems little objection to this part of the Union; and in general it may be observed of the articles of that treaty, what often occurs with compacts intended to oblige future ages, that they have rather tended to throw obstacles in the way of reformations for the substan tial benefit of Scotland, than to protect her against encroachment and usurpation.

66

This however could not be securely anticipated in the reign of Anne; and no doubt, the measure was an experiment of such hazard that every lover of his country must have consented in trembling, or revolted from it with disgust. No past experience of history was favorable to the absorption of a lesser state (at least where the government partook so much of the republican form) in one of superior power and ancient rivalry. The representation of Scotland in the united legislature was too feeble to give anything like security against the English prejudices and animosities, if they should continue or revive. The church was exposed to the most apparent perils, brough thus within the power of a legislature, so frequently influenced by one who held her not as a sister, but rather as a bastard usurper of sister's inheritance; and though her permanence was guaranteed by th treaty, yet it was hard to say how far the legal competence of parlia ment might hereafter be deemed to extend, or at least how far she might be abridged of her privileges, and impaired in her dignity. I very few of these mischiefs have resulted from the Union, it h doubtless been owing to the prudence of our government, and chief to the general sense of right and the diminution of national and reli gious bigotry during the last century. But it is always to be kept i mind, as the best justification of those who came into so great s sacrifice of national patriotism, that they gave up no excellent form of polity, that the Scotch constitution had never produced the peo ple's happiness, that their parliament was bad in its composition, and