the academies of Italy is evident from the Elogio of Salvatore Canella. The spirit which he kindled during the administration of Walpole still burns in the epics of Glover, in the tragedies of Brooke, in the finest of Akenside's compositions, in the stateliest of Thomson's verses, in the noblest of Collins's odes, in the most popular of our national ballads. To the influence of his writings is to be attributed in no small degree that remarkable transformation which converted the Toryism of Rochester and Nottingham into the Toryism of Pitt and Mansfield. He annihilated the Jacobites. He turned the tide against Walpole, and he formulated the principles which afterwards developed into the creed of what is called in our own day Liberal Conservatism. It would in truth be scarcely possible to over-estimate the extent of his influence on public opinion between 1725 and 1742.

He sprang from an ancient and honourable race, which had, as early as the thirteenth century, mingled the blood of a noble Norman family with the blood of a Saxon family not less illustrious. William de St. John, a Norman knight, was quartermaster-general in the army of the Conqueror. The estates which rewarded the services of his son passed with other property into the hands of a female representative, who became the wife of Adam de Port, one of the wealthiest of the Saxon aristocracy. Their son William assuming the maiden name of his mother, the name De Port was absorbed in the name of St. John. The family grew and prospered. John St. John was one of the Council of Nine appointed after the battle of Lewes. The widow of his descendant Oliver became by her marriage with the Duke of Somerset the grandmother of Henry VII.; and a window in Battersea Church, gorgeous with heraldic emblazonry, still commemorates this alliance with the Tudors. In the reign of Elizabeth the St. Johns became the Barons of Bletso; in the reign of James I. one of them was created Earl of Bolingbroke. Nor were the representatives of the younger line less eminent. The services of Oliver St. John as Lord Deputy of Ireland were rewarded with the Barony of Tregoze in Wiltshire. During the Civil Wars the St. Johns came prominently forward. The elder line, represented by the Earl of Bolingbroke, and by that great lawyer-over whose birth was the bar sinister, but who was destined to become a Chief Justice of England and to adorn his high office-were in conspicuous opposition to the Crown. The younger line, represented by John St. John, who lost three sons in the field, were as conspicuously distinguished by their loyalty. The days of trouble passed by, and the subsequent marriage of Sir Walter St. John, a member

a member of the Royalist branch, with Joanna, a daughter of the Chief Justice, probably composed political differences. The young couple settled at Battersea, to the manor of which Sir Walter had succeeded by the death of his nephew. The virtues of the Lady Joanna were long remembered in the neighbourhood. Her husband's munificence is more imperishably recorded in the school which he founded nearly two centuries ago, and which has ever since been one of the ornaments of Battersea. His crest and motto may still be seen over the gate; his portrait still adorns the walls. He died at an advanced age in 1708. The issue of this marriage was a daughter Barbara and a son Henry, of whom we know little, and that little is not to his credit. The dissipated habits of the young man probably alarming his parents, they resorted to the expedient usual in such cases, and the lad became the husband of Mary, second daughter and joint-heiress of Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick.* The remedy, however, only aggravated the disease. Henry. became worse than ever. At last he brought his reckless and dissolute career to a climax by the murder of St. William Escourt in a brawl. He was arrested. His friends were in despair. After much anxious deliberation, his counsel advised him to plead guilty, and to throw himself on the mercy of the King. For some time it was doubtful whether the united influence of the St. Johns and the Riches could prevent him from expiating his crime at Tyburn, or whether indeed the King could, even if he wished it, stretch his prerogative so far as to pardon a subject convicted of so grave an offence. At last the culprit was permitted to retire to Battersea. A bribe was accepted. The case was dropped, and he dragged on a listless and good-for-nothing life for nearly half a century longer. Six years before this event his wife had borne him a child, who was destined to inherit all his vices, but with those vices to unite abilities which, if properly directed, and less unhappily tempered, might have given him a place in history beside Pericles and Chatham, and a place in letters beside Bacon and Burke. Henry St. John, afterwards Lord Viscount Bolingbroke, was born at Battersea in the October of 1678, and was baptized on the tenth of that month.

The house in which he first saw the light has, with the exception of one wing which is still preserved, been long since levelled with the ground. For his early education he was indebted to his grandparents, who shared the family residence

The youth appears to have added to his other vices that of hypocrisy, as we find him described in the Autobiography of Mary, Countess of Warwick' as a 'young gentleman very good-natured and viceless.'

with their son and daughter-in-law. Sir Walter was a member of the Established Church, and appears to have been a kind and tolerant man. But his wife had been bred among the Puritans, and to the ascetic piety of her sect she added, we suspect, something of her father's moroseness. She ruled the house at Battersea. She superintended the education of her grandchild. It was conducted on principles of injudicious austerity, and Bolingbroke never recurred to this period of his life without disgust. The good lady delighted in perusing the gigantic tomes in which the Puritan Fathers discussed the doctrine of

the Eucharist and the Atonement. Patrick's Mensa Mystica' had been written under her roof, and she had shared with her husband the honour of the dedication; but Patrick held only the second place in her affections-her favourite was Dr. Manton. This stupendous theologian-five of his folios still slumber in our libraries-prided himself on having written a hundred and nineteen sermons on the hundred and nineteenth Psalm, and to the perusal of these hundred and nineteen sermons she compelled her grandson to betake himself. There is reason for believing that the child was for some time under the tuition of Daniel Burgess, a learned and eccentric Nonconformist, who is now remembered chiefly as the butt of Swift, but who was in those days celebrated as one of the most popular of metropolitan preachers. His definition of a law-suit and of thorough-paced doctrine are still treasured by collectors of good sayings.

In due time Henry was removed to Eton, where he remained for some years. About his career there tradition is silent. We know that Walpole was one of his contemporaries; and Coxe has added that the seeds of that long and bitter rivalry which ever afterwards existed between the two schoolfellows were sown in the class room and the playground. This, however, is highly improbable. Walpole acquitted himself creditably during his school career, and is not likely either by indolence or dulness to have permitted a lad two years his junior to assume the position of a rival. What became of him after leaving Eton it is now impossible to discover. His career is indeed at this point involved in more obscurity than his biographers seem to suspect. They assert, for example, that on leaving Eton he matriculated at Oxford, and became an undergraduate of Christ Church, and they have described with some precision his University career. Now of this residence at Oxford there is no proof at all. There is no entry of his matriculation on the books of the University, and these books are not, we believe, in any way deficient during the period of his supposed connection with Oxford. There is no trace of his

residence

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residence at Christ Church on the Buttery Lists, and the Buttery Lists have from the Midsummer of 1695 been kept with scrupulous exactness. There is no trace of his residence to be found in the entry-books of the Dean. We cannot find any allusion to his ever having been a resident member of the University in the correspondence of those accomplished men who must have been his contemporaries. But one circumstance seems to us conclusive. He was the patron of John Philips, and that pleasing poet has in two of his poems spoken of him in terms of exaggerated encomium. Philips was a student of Christ Church, and in his 'Cyder' he takes occasion to celebrate the eminent men connected with that distinguished seminary; but though he mentions Harcourt and Bromley, he makes no allusion to St. John. The error, we suspect, arose from this. On the occasion of Queen Anne's visit to Oxford in 1702 St. John was made an honorary doctor and entered on the books of Christ Church. He was proud of the honour which the College of Atterbury and Harcourt had done him, and not only delighted to speak of himself as a Christ Church man, but ever afterwards considered that a member of that foundation had a special claim to his patronage. But Christ Church is not entitled to number him among her sons.

Wherever he pursued his studies, he probably pursued them with assiduity. He was all his life distinguished by attainments the groundwork of which is seldom or never laid in afteryears. The specimen which he has left of his Latin composition, with the letters to Alari, prove that he had paid some attention to the niceties of verbal scholarship. Much of the recondite learning which he so ostentatiously paraded in his philosophical works was, it is evident, the trophy of adroit plagiarism, but it is no less evident-as every page of his writings shows--that his classical acquirements, if not exact, were unusually extensive. He was conversant with the Roman prose writers, from Varro to Gellius, and the frequency with which he draws on them for purposes of analogy, comment and illustration, the felicity with which he adapts their sentiments and opinions, the ready propriety with which their allusions and anecdotes respond to his call is a sufficient guarantee for the assimilative thoroughness with which he had perused them. Indeed, his acquaintance with Cicero and Seneca appears to have been such as few scholars have possessed. He had studied them as Montaigne studied Plutarch, as Bacon studied Tacitus. To the poets he had not, we suspect, paid the same attention, though his quotations from Lucretius, Horace and Virgil are often exquisitely happy. Whatever may have been his attainments in Greek, he

had

12

14

Lord Bolingbroke.

had at least mastered the rudiments, could discuss the signification of words, and had read in some form or other principal orators, Homer and Hesiod among the poets, and

of the historians.

It is the privilege of later years to mature and apply. to inaugurate, such studies. We are therefore inclined to that his biographers have plunged him into debauchery prematurely, and that these years of his life, wherever they n have been passed, were judiciously and profitably emp But the scene soon changed. In 1697 we find him in where he abandoned himself to the dominion of the two pa which ever afterwards ruled him, inordinate ambition an ordinate love of pleasure. At thirty he was in the hal observing that his heroes were Alcibiades and Petron twenty his model, he said, was his cousin John Wilmot, of Rochester. That unhappy nobleman had, ten years be terminated a career to which it would be difficult to fi parallel in the annals of human folly. Everything that make the life of man splendid, prosperous, and happy Nature and Fortune had conspired to lavish on him. N had endowed him with abilities of a high order, with li instincts, with refined tastes, with brilliant wit, with a l genius which, if properly cultivated, might have placed beside Beranger and Herrick, with a handsome and engag person, with manners singularly winning and graceful. tune had added rank and opulence, and had thus opened to him all sources of social and intellectual enjoyment; enabled him to gratify every ambition, to cultivate every t

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and to enter that sphere where the qualities that distinguishe ever, a depraved and diseased mind counteracted these inestih him could be seen to the greatest advantage. Unhappily, he infamy. A premature death had been the just penalty for madness: bat the tradition of his genius and of his brilliant pe Lad in the eres of young and gair men lent a romantic He was anxious or to be pre-eminent abomis bravery at Bergen, his wiromas with Villiers, amours. Lis convivial cores and there anxious to follow Ther leamsad his pens by heart. La botsteps. Indeed, the infance of Rochester on the youj of Landre in the later garter of the sewn centary appeal rfect Ther listened with eagerness to stor sane class a trained and raven rears later. Fat St. John wned t to have resembled in some degren the informer of Beron on th

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