attentive and eulogistic of his listeners. Long before his abilities had fully matured themselves, the gates of St. Stephen's were closed against him; but not before an audience familiar with the eloquence of Halifax and Somers had pronounced him to be the first orator of his age. 'I would rather,' said Pitt, have a speech of Bolingbroke's than any of the lost treasures of antiquity.' The charm of his conversation has been described by men whose judgment is without appeal, by Pope and Voltaire, by Swift, Orrery and Chesterfield. His His character was, however, so unhappily constituted that these superb powers were seldom or never in harmonious cooperation. The virtues which balance and control, sobriety, moderation, consistency, had no part in his composition. impetuosity and intemperance amounted to disease. To the end of his long life he was the slave not merely of every passion, but of every impulse; and what the capricious tyranny of emotion suggested had for the moment the power of completely transforming him. He exhibited by turns the traits peculiar to the most exalted and to the most debased of our species. His virtues and his vices, his reason and his passions, did not as in ordinary men blend themselves in a gradation of tints, but remained isolated in sudden and glaring contrast. His transitions were from extreme to extreme. He was sometimes all vice, he was sometimes all elevation. When his fine intellect was unclouded, his shrewdness and sagacity were a match for De Torcy; his dexterity and adroitness more than a match for Marlborough and Godolphin. When his intellect took the ply from his passions, there was little to distinguish him from the most hot-headed and hare-brained of his own tools. In his sublimer moments he out-Catoed Cato, in his less exalted moods he sank below Sandys and Dodington. When in retirement, he shut himself up with the Tusculans' and the Enchiridion, he lived and talked as became a disciple of the Porch. When he reappeared among men, his debaucheries were the scandal of the two most profligate capitals in Europe. His actions were sometimes those of a high-minded and chivalrous gentleman, capable of making great sacrifices, and distinguished by a spirit of romantic generosity. A change of mood would suffice to transform him into the most callous, the most selfish, the most cynical of misanthropes. He was never, we believe, a deliberate hypocrite, but his emotions were so transient that he might have passed for Tartuffe himself. The fascination of his manners and the brilliancy of his parts naturally surrounded him with many friends. Friendship was, he said, indispensable to his being; it was the noblest of human instincts; instincts; it was sacred; it should be inviolable; it was in its purity the prerogative only of great and good men. His letters to Prior, to Swift, to Alari and to Pope, abound in the most extravagant professions of attachment. His letters to Lord Hardwicke are sometimes almost fulsome. But what was the sequel? He quarrelled with Alari for presuming to advise him. He dropped Swift when the letters of Swift ceased to entertain him. He dropped Hardwicke from mere caprice. His perfidy to Pope is, we believe, literally without example in social treachery. He bore the most excruciating of human maladies with a placid fortitude which would have done honour to Stylites; but the slightest error on the part of his cook would send him into such paroxysms of rage that his friends were glad to be out of his house. His whole soul was tormented by an insatiable thirst for literary and political distinction; it would, we believe, be impossible to find in his voluminous correspondence half-a-dozen letters in which he does not express contempt both for the world and for the world's regard. His opinions were as wayward and as whimsical as his actions. He delighted to write of himself as the votary of a mild and tolerant philosophy which had taught him the vanity of ambition, and could be nourished only in that retirement, which, thanks to his enemies, he was enabled to enjoy. Before the ink was dry he was ransacking our language for scurrilous epithets against those who had excluded him from active life. Resignation was, he said, the virtue on which he especially prided himself. His life was notoriously one long and fierce rebellion. He professed the greatest respect for prescription, and is one of the most revolutionary of writers; for the Church, and would have betrayed it; for Christianity, and was in the van of its bitterest assailants. He delivered himself sometimes in rhodomontade redolent of the ethics of Seneca and of the Utopias of Plato and Xenophon, and sometimes in rhodomontade breathing the spirit of the Prince and of the Fable of the Bees. As the subject of Anne, he went as far as Filmer in his estimate of the royal prerogative; as the subject of George, he went beyond Paley in depreciating it. As the minister of Anne, he was the originator of the Stamp Act; as the subject of George, he was the loudest and most vehement of those demagogues who clamoured for the absolute freedom of the press. The age he lived in he pronounced to be the Nadir of moral and political corruption; he proposed to purify it by a scheme which postulates the perfection of those whose vices are to be cured by it. The truth is that, with quick sensibilities he had no depth of feeling, with much insight no convictions. What would in well-regulated minds develop into principle, remained in him mere sentiment; and his sentiments were like the whims of a libertine, ardent, fanciful and transitory. His head was hot, but his heart was cold. In the latter part of his career he set himself up as the castigator of political immorality, and as the loftiest and most disinterested of patriots. His own public life had been such that each part of it seems elaborately designed to set off and heighten the turpitude of some other part. The shameless charlatanism of his career at the head of the extreme Tories might have passed perhaps for honest zeal-intemperate, indeed, but pure-had he not at the head of the extreme Whigs found it expedient to cover his former principles with ridicule. It was not till he became the hottest of factious incendiaries out of power that men realized the baseness of his despotic conservatism in power. It was not till he betrayed the interests of St. Germains that it was possible to estimate the extent of his treachery to the interests of Hanover. It was not till he became the teacher of Voltaire and the Apostle of Scepticism that his unscrupulousness in forcing on the Bill against Occasional Conformity and in originating the Schism Bill fully revealed itself. Some of his biographers have indeed laboured to explain away many of the inconsistencies of his public conduct. In other words, they have attempted to do for Bolingbroke what in ancient times Isocrates attempted to do for Busiris, and what in our own day Mr. Beesly has attempted to do for Catiline, and Mr. Christie for Shaftesbury. But the attempt has failed. The facts speak for themselves. There can be no doubt about Bolingbroke's repeatedly declaring the Revolution to be the guarantee of our civil and religious liberties, and that both before and after his fall he laboured to set the Act of Settlement aside. There can be no doubt about his satisfying himself that if the Pretender ascended the throne without giving pledges for the security of our national faith there would be civil war, and that he moved heaven and earth to put the Pretender on the throne without insisting on any such pledges. It is certain that he defended the Treaty of Utrecht mainly on the ground of England's exhaustion being such that without repose paralysis was imminent; and that not long afterwards he was lamenting that he could not at the head of a French army violate his own Treaty, and plunge that country, of which he had boasted himself the saviour, into the double horrors of foreign invasion and internecine strife. It is certain that he professed the principles of the moderate Tories, of the extreme Tories, of the Jacobites, of the Hano verians, verians, of the Whigs in office and of the Whigs in opposition, and it is equally certain that, with the exception of the last party, they all taunted him with perfidy. power. It would, however, be a great mistake to confound Bolingbroke either with fribbles like the second Villiers, whom he resembled in the infirmities of his temper, or with sycophants like Sunderland, whom he resembled in want of principle. His nature had, with all its flaws, been cast in no ignoble mould. The ambition which consumed him was the ambition which consumed Cæsar and Cicero, not the ambition which consumed Harley and Newcastle. For the mere baubles of power he cared nothing. Riches and their trappings he regarded with unaffected contempt. He entered office a man by no means wealthy, and with expensive habits; he quitted it with hands as clean as Pitt's. The vanity which feeds on adulation never tainted his haughty spirit. His prey was not carrion. His vast and visionary ambition was bounded only by the highest pinnacles of human glory. He aspired to enrol himself among those great men who have shaped the fortunes and moulded the minds of mighty nations-with the demigods of Plutarch, with the sages of Diogenes. As a statesman he never rested till he stood without a rival on the summit of As a philosopher he sought a place beside Aristotle and Bacon, and the infirmities of age overtook him while labouring at a work which was to class him with Guicciardini and Clarendon. This was not to be. One faculty had indeed been granted him in a measure rarely conceded to the children of men—a faculty which is of all others most likely to mislead contemporaries, and least likely to deceive posterity-the faculty of eloquent expression. His style may be praised almost without reservation. It is distinguished by the union of those qualities which are in the estimation of critics sufficient to constitute perfection-by elevation, by rapidity, by picturesqueness, by perspicuity, by scrupulous chastity, by the charm of an ever-varying music. It combines, as no other English style has ever combined, the graces of colloquy with the graces of rhetoric. It is essentially eloquent, but it is an eloquence which is, to employ his own happy illustration, like a stream fed by an abundant spring-an eloquence which never flags, which is never inappropriate, which never palls. His fertility of expression is wonderful. Over all the resources of our noble and opulent language his mastery is at once exquisite and unlimited. Of effort and elaboration he has no traces. His ideas seem to clothe themselves spontaneously in their rich and varied garb. He had studied, as few Englishmen at that day had studied, the master pieces of French literature, but no taint of Gallicism mars the transcendent purity of his English. His pages are a storehouse of fine and graceful images, of felicitous phrases, of new and striking combinations. As an essayist he is not inferior to his master, Seneca. As a political satirist he is second only to Junius. As a letter-writer he ranks with Pliny and Cicero, and we cannot but regret that so large a portion of his correspondence is still permitted to remain unpublished. On English prose his influence was immediate and permanent. It would not indeed be too much to say that it owes more to Bolingbroke than to any other single writer. Hooker and Taylor had already lent it colour and pomp; Dryden had given it verve, variety, flexibility; De Foe and Swift had brought it home to the vulgar; the Periodical Writers had learned from the pulpit to endow it with elegance and harmony; but it was reserved for Bolingbroke to be the Cicero of our tongue. He was, in truth, the founder of an illustrious dynasty of stylists. On him Burke modelled his various and exuberant eloquence. From him Junius learned some of his most characteristic graces. The two Pitts made no secret of their obligations to him; and among his disciples are to be numbered Goldsmith,* Gibbon, Hume, and even Macaulay. His genius was, it is true, too irregularly cultivated, his aspirations too multiform, his reason too essentially under the control of passion, to secure him any high place among the teachers of mankind, and yet few men have impressed themselves more decidedly on the intellectual activity of their age. That great revolution in the study of history which found its first emphatic expression in Montesquieu is undoubtedly to be traced to him. By the philosophers of the Encyclopédie he was recognized as a leader. Voltaire's obligations to him are confessed by Condorcet. To Bolingbroke he owed his introduction to the works of Bacon, Newton, and Locke; much of his philosophy, many of his historical theories. Indeed, Voltaire appears to have regarded him with feelings approaching as nearly to reverence as it was perhaps possible for him to attain. Idolized by Pope, Bolingbroke suggested and inspired some of the most valuable of Pope's compositions-the Essay on Man, the Moral Essays, the Imitations of Horace. His influence on *For the influence of Bolingbroke's style on that of Goldsmith we would point especially to The Present State of Polite Learning in Europe,' and to the Dedication of the 'Traveller.' What Macaulay learned from him was, we think, the art of combining dignity with sprightliness, copiousness with scrupulous purity: many turns of expression, and the rhetorical effect both of the short sentence and of clause reiteration. the |