1751.

THE LAST OF BOLINGBROKE.

371

The year 1751, which may be said to have opened with the death of poor Frederick, closed with the death of a man greater by far than any prince of the House of Hanover. On December 12 Bolingbroke passed away. He had settled himself quietly down in his old home at Battersea, and there he died. He had outlived his closest friends and his keenest enemies. The wife-the second wife-to whom, with all his faults, he had been much devoted-was long dead. Pope and Gay, and Arbuthnot, and Matt' Prior and Swift were dead. Walpole, his great opponent, was dead. All chance of a return to public life had faded years before. New conditions and new men had arisen. He was oldwas in his seventy-fourth year; there was not much left to him to live for. There had been a good deal of the spirit of the classic philosopher about him— the school of Epictetus, not the school of Aristotle or Plato. He was a Georgian Epictetus with a dash of Gallicised grace about him. He made the most out of everything as it came, and probably got some comfort out of disappointment as well as out of success. Life had been for him one long dramatic performance, and he played it out consistently to the end.

He had long believed himself a formidable enemy to Christianity—at least to revealed religion. He made arrangements by his will for the publication, among other writings, of certain essays which were designed to give Christianity its death-blow, and, having satisfactorily settled that business and

BB 2

disposed in advance of the faith of coming ages, he turned his face to the wall and died.

The reign of George the Second was not a great era of reform; but there was accomplished about this time a measure of reform which we cannot omit to mention. This was the Marriage Act, brought in and passed by Lord Hardwicke, the Lord Chancellor, in 1753. The Marriage Act provided that no marriage should be legal in England unless the banns had been put up in the parish church for three successive Sundays previously, or a special license had been obtained from the Archbishop, and unless the marriage were celebrated in the parish church. The Bill provided that any clergyman celebrating a marriage without these formalities should be liable to penal servitude for seven years. This piece of legislation put a stop to some of the most shocking and disgraceful abuses in certain classes of English social life. With other abuses went the infamous Fleet marriages— marriages performed by broken-down and disreputable clergymen whose head-quarters were very commonly the Fleet prison,-couple-beggars' who would perform the marriage ceremony between any man and woman without asking questions, sometimes not even asking their names, provided they got a fee for the performance. Men of this class, a scandal to their order, and still more to the system of law which allowed them to flourish, were to be found at almost every pot-house in the populous neighbourhoods, ready to ply their trade at any moment. Perhaps a drunken young lad was brought up to be married

1753.

THE LAST OF THE FLEET PARSON.

373

in a half-unconscious state to some elderly prostitute perhaps some rich young woman was carried off against her will to be married forcibly to some man who wanted her money. The Fleet parson asked no questions, did his work, and pocketed his fee-and the marriage was legal. Lord Hardwicke's Act stopped the business and relegated the Fleet parson to the pages of romance.

Years went on-years of quiet at home, save for little Ministerial wrangles-years of almost uninterrupted war abroad. The peace that was patched up at Aix-la-Chapelle was evidently a peace that could not last-that was not meant to last. If no other European power would have broken it, England herself probably would, for the arrangements were believed at home to be very much to her disadvantage, and were highly unpopular. But there was no need for England to begin. The Family Compact was in full force. The Bourbons of France were determined to gain more than they had got; the Bourbons of Spain were eager to recover what they had lost. The genius and daring of Frederick of Prussia were not likely to remain inactive. As we have seen, the war between England and France raged on in India without regard to treaties and truces on the European Continent. There was, in fact, a great trial of strength going on, and it had to be fought out. England and France had yet another stage to struggle on as well as Europe and India. They had the continent of North America. There were always some disputes about boundaries going on there; and

a dispute concerning a boundary between two States which are mistrustful of one another is like a flickering flame close to a train of gunpowder. The renewal of war on the Continent gave for the first time its full chance to the genius of William Pitt as a great war minister. The breaking out of war in North America established England as the controlling power there, and settled for ever the pretensions of France and of Spain. It is not necessary for us in this history to follow the course of the Contitinental wars. The great results of these to England were worked out on other soil.

CHAPTER XL.

CANADA.

WE have seen that, when the young Duke of Cumberland, after the battle of Culloden, was earning his right to the title of Butcher,' one English officer at least had the courage to protest by his actions against the atrocities of the English general. That soldier was James Wolfe, then a young lieutenant-colonel, who had served his apprenticeship to arms in the Low Countries in the war of the Austrian Succession, and earned by his courage and his abilities an honourable name. He was destined to make that name famous by the part he was to play in the events that were taking place in Canada. The red-haired, unattractive soldier, whose cold and almost repellent manner concealed some of the highest qualities, was fated to do as much for the glory of the English Empire in one part of the world as Clive in another. But there could hardly be two men more different than Clive and Wolfe. The one was always an adventurer, a gentleman adventurer, indeed, and a brilliant specimen of the class, but an adventurer still, and with some of the worst vices of his kind. Wolfe, on the contrary, resembled more the better men among