Bolingbroke survived Pope fourteen years. He had resided at Battersea after the death of his father, and here, in 1750, he brought her, who, he said, "had been the comfort of his life,” to die. He had lost one who thoroughly admired, comprehended, and loved him. Their tenderness had been signal. The charm of her society, her broken English, her eloquent French, were long remembered by those who knew Lady Bolingbroke. The experience for thirty years of her virtues had shown Lord Bolingbroke the value of woman. A little trait of Lady Bolingbroke, shows her clear perception of the change which came over her once brilliant husband in later days. Walking with Walking with her in his own grounds, accompanied by a friend, Bolingbroke began to relate some of the gallantries of his younger days. "He reminds me," said his lady to the friend with them, “of a fine old Roman aqueduct; but, alas! it is in ruins, the water has ceased to flow."-THOMSON, KATHERINE (GRACE WHARTON), 1861, Celebrated Friendships, vol. II, pp. 210, 211. In this English Alcibiades, what restless, but what rich vitality!-LYTTON, EDWARD BULWER LORD, 1863-68, Caxtoniana, Miscellaneous Prose Works, vol. III, p. 88. Excessive drinking, profane swearing, and loose conversation were not even the worst. It must be confessed that the Secretary outraged the decencies of his situation still more grossly. Though his wife was devotedly attached to him, and though they still lived under the same roof, he was as licentious as in the days of his early youth, when it had been his boast to rival the wild exploits of Rochester. The House of Commons, the War Office, the studies in his country retirement, the development of his genius, the Secretary of State's office, the rivalry with Harley, all the promptings of a high and justifiable ambition had not rendered his life purer than that of the lowest rake about London. On the news of St. John's appointment as Secretary of State spreading through the town, an ancient lady who presided over a mansion of easy virtue, exclaimed with delight, "Five thousand a year, my girls, and all for us!" It is not from his political enemies, from Steele, Addison, or Walpole that we have the most explicit details of St. John's habitual debaucheries. The Secretary's friends have been the most candid. A handsome woman, they all admit, sometimes jestingly and sometimes sadly, was a temptation he never could resist. Rank made no difference whatever in his appreciation. With the same ardour he would make love to a maid of honour about the person of the Queen, or follow in broad daylight a common woman of the town, whose appearance might happen to please him, as he was walking with some friends in the Mall. After this it was an edifying sight to behold the Secretary at his prayers.—MACKNIGHT, THOMAS, 1863, The Life of Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, p. 213. Three years of eager unwise power, the thirty-five of sickly longing and impotent regret,—such, or something like it, will ever be in this cold modern world the fate of an Alcibiades.-BAGEHOT, WALTER, 1863, Bolingbroke as a Statesman, Works, ed. Morgan, vol. II, p. 221. Bolingbroke was capable of intrigue, but not of action. He could cabal with the backstairs, worry his colleagues, negotiate with the men of letters who were of his party, and debauch as far as possible the House of Commons.ROGERS, JAMES E. THOROLD, 1869, Historical Gleanings, First series, vol. 1, p. 36. A sceptic and cynic, minister in turn to Queen and Pretender, disloyal alike to both, a trafficker in consciences, marriages, and promises, who had squandered his talent in debauch and intrigues, to TAINE, H. A., 1871, History of English end in disgrace, impotence, and scorn. Literature, tr. Van Laun, vol. II, bk. iii, ch. iii, p. 47. In conversation he developed that versatility and fire, which distinguish him as a writer; and perhaps he was altogether born rather to be a writer than a statesman.-RANKE, LEOPOLD VON, 1875, A History of England, vol. v, p. 348. Adored by Pope-whom he attended on his death-bed, and who considered him the first writer, as well as the greatest man, of his age; hated by Walpole as a political rival; lauded by Swift and Smollett; despised as "a scoundrel and a coward" by Dr. Johnson. His youth had been so wild that his father's congratulation when he was created a viscount was, "Ah, Harry, I ever said you would be hanged; but now I find you will be beheaded."HARE, AUGUSTUS J. C., 1878, Walks in London, vol. II, ch. x. St. John was the inspired son of genius. He was a being formed on a model that had come into notice in France, where it was copied from the great monarch himself. Its type was the man of pleasure, who can at an instant's notice become the man of affairs. Display, luxury, and riot appeared to ordinary mortals all that such a being was capable of achieving; but let the sudden crisis come, and the call to action, though dragged from the gamingtable or the "midnight modern conversation," as Hogarth has immortalised such scenes, the debauchee became clear in council and prompt in action. -BURTON, JOHN HILL, 1880, A History of the Reign of Queen Anne, vol. III, p. 75. We can write with temper of the latter days of the Empire, or of the constitutions of the Medieval Republics; but the reign of Anne still rouses and enlists the passions of partisans. And Bolingbroke has been impartially assailed by every party. It was his misfortune to incur the resentment of the Whigs and the resentment of the Tories. He was attacked by the friends of the Revolution and by the enemies of the Revolution, by the Nonjurors and by the Presbyterian Dissenters, by Williamites and by Jacobites, by Atterbury and by Defoe. The Whigs, he himself declared, had done all they could to expose him for a fool, and to brand him for a knave; and though the Tories had not impeached him for treason to the State, they had impeached him for treason to themselves. "That last burst of the cloud," he exclaimed, "has gone near to overwhelm me." There are some open questions in our Histories as in our Cabinets; and the character of Bolingbroke may still be regarded as an open question -and not improperly. At all events, the writer who maintains that Henry St. John was abler and honester than most of his contemporaries, is not necessarily ventilating a caprice, or airing a paradox.SKELTON, JOHN, 1883, The Great Lord Bolingbroke, Essays in History and Biography, p. 166. Nor was Bolingbroke's personal character, with all its striking features, one likely to prove attractive to a party of English fox-hunters, whether lay or clerical. His polished manners, his lively wit, his quick perceptions, his facile speech, his ready invention, the ease with which he caught and mimicked the intemperate tone of his rude supporters, his fondness for subterfuge and artifice, his affectation of philosophical indifference to the objects for which he was at the moment most eagerly striving, his vanity, his industry, his simulated idleness, his unfeigned respect for speculative truth, his falseness in all public and personal relations, the vastness and boldness of his political enterprises, the nervous apprehension of physical danger which at the critical moment marred so many of them, the loftiness of his moral conceptions, the looseness and even dirtiness of his private life, -all these things were the marks of a character which in its strange and various traits an Italian of the great age of Florence would have studied with respectful interest, but which repelled the Trullibers and Westerns from its very In the statesdissimilarity to their own. manship of such a man there is no doubt a natural propensity to indirect and tortuous ways, to sinister intrigues, to organized deceptions, to statements which, when literally true, are calculated and designed to give a false impression, to concealed engagements and sudden surprises. Bolingbroke has himself explained this necessity in a characteristic passage and under a fine simile.-HARROP, ROBERT, 1884, Bolingbroke, A Political Study and Criticism, p. 191. 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 touched 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 enroll 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 power. As a philosopher he sought a place beside Aristotle and Bacon, and the infirmities of age overtook him while meditating a work which was to class him with Guicciardini and Clarendon.-COLLINS, JOHN CHURTON, 1886, Bolingbroke, A Historical Study, and Voltaire in England, p. 14. The defect of his nature was, that there was not sufficient ballast for the weight of sail. He would be first always; and not borrow, but found a system. His talents made him lead; there was not enough of judgment, patience, sympathy, or, above all, consistency, to constitute a successful leader. His career, in all its several divisions, had ever the same features. It left a profound impression of force, which may be traced in contemporary literature, but he could never keep his levies long from disbanding. immediate survivors were unable to explain the sudden decline of the influence of his ideas, when the man, with his contagious strength of will, was gone; posterity cannot understand whence arose his influence at the first.-STEBBING, WILLIAM, 1887, Some Verdicts of History Reviewed, p. 152. His 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. . . . 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.MCCARTHY, JUSTIN, 1890, A History of the Four Georges, vol. II, ch. xxxix. That he was a consummate scoundrel is now universally admitted; but his mental qualifications, though great, still excite differences of opinion. Even those who are comforted by his style and soothed by the rise and fall of his sentences, are fain to admit that had his classic head been severed from his shoulders a rogue would have met with his deserts. He has been long since stripped of all his fine pretences, and morally speaking, runs as naked through the pages of history as erst he did (according to Goldsmith) across Hyde Park.-BIRRELL, AUGUSTINE, 1894, Essays about Men, Women and Books, p. 17. St. Johns's handsome person, and a face in which dignity was happily blended with sweetness, his commanding presence, his fascinating address, his vivacity, his wit, his extraordinary memory, his subtlety in thinking and reasoning, and oratorical powers of the very highest order, contributed to his phenomenal success as a parliamentary orator. Very few fragments of his speeches have come down to us, but from criticisms of those who heard him speak, and from his published writings, they must have been brilliant, sarcastic, and extremely effective, and Lord Chatham said that the loss of his speeches was to be more greatly deplored than the lost books of Livy.-HARDWICKE, HENRY, 1896, History of Oratory and Orators, p. 91. All great men should be judged by the aims and standards of their age. But perhaps no great man ever needed the sympathy of imagination leavening judgment more than Henry St. John, the first Viscount Bolingbroke. He was born to be admired rather than loved, to be dreaded rather than respected. He was unique in a unique period. Statesmanship, eloquence, and adminstrative ability, which in his hot-headed youth compelled the admiration of Swift and the mingled fear and wonder of both Harley and Marlborough, which in his middle age by turns dazzled and embittered Pulteney and Carteret, which awed Walpole and his satellites beneath the mask of their scorn, which nearly succeeded in moulding a loose faction into a magnificent party, which provoked, after his death, the young Burke into indignant imitation, which controlled the reins of Government during the last four years of Queen Anne, and moved the springs of opposition during the first eight years of George the Second, were allied to a literary genius which has left an undying imprint on Pope and Voltaire, a style which kindled Chatham, inspired Gibbon, and preluded Macaulay, a personal fascination and irresistible persuasiveness which enchanted his "dearest foes."-SICHEL, WALTER, 1901, Bolingbroke and His Times, p. 1. THE IDEA OF A PATRIOT KING It is a work, sir, which will instruct mankind and do honour to its author; and yet I will take upon me to say that, for the sake of both, you must publish it with caution. The greatest men have their faults, and sometimes the greatest faults; but the faults of superior minds are the least indifferent, both to themselves and to society. Humanity is interested in the name of those who excelled in it; but it is interested before all in the good order of society, and in the peace of the minds of the individuals who compose it. Lord Bolingbroke's mind embraced all objects, and looked far into all, but not without a strong mixture of passions, which will always necessarily beget some prejudices and follow more. And in the subject of religion particularly (whatever was the motive that inflamed his passions upon that subject chiefly), his passions were there most strong; and I will venture to say (when called upon as I think to say it), what I have said more than once to himself, with the deference due to his age and extraordinary talents; his passions upon that subject did prevent his otherwise superior reason from seeing that, even in a political light only, he hurt himself, and wounded society by striking at establishments upon which the conduct at least of society depends, and by striving to overturn in men's minds the systems which experience at least has justified, and which at least has rendered respectable, as necessary to public order and private peace, without suggesting to men's minds a better, or indeed any system. You will find this, sir, to be done in a part of the work I mentioned, where he digresses upon the criticism of Church History.-HYDE, LORD, 1752, Letter to David Mallet, March 7. This lord had strength and elevation of mind; but he was a sorry philosopher.— GIBBON, EDWARD, 1764, Journal. Possibly the "Patriot King"-his most finished performance-would have thrilled the House of Commons as a speech. Read in cold blood, the weakness of the substance weakens our appreciation of the elegance of the style.-STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1876, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. II, p. 169. The most popular and in some ways the most finished of his writings, a party pamphlet devised for a temporary object, an appeal from the statesmanship of the nation to poets and non-jurors and striplings fresh from college, an adroit piece of flattery laid at the feet of the Parliamentary heir, but with a graver meaning and purpose which have secured it a more lasting fame. For this little tract, carefully excluded from general circulation by its author till the eve of his own death, has influenced the speculations of four generations of Englishmen, formed the political creed of George III., created the faction of the King's friends, encouraged the conspirators who broke the power of the Whig nobility, inspired that mixture. of the autocratic with the popular which distinguished the rival policy of Chatham and William Pitt, and in our own time fired the imagination of a great minister who aimed at reviving under the phrase imperium et libertas its distinctive qualities.-HARROP, ROBERT, 1884, Bolingbroke, A Political Study and Criticism, p. 300. On the composition of the "Patriot King," Bolingbroke took more pains than was usual with him. It is perhaps, in point of execution, his most finished work. But style, though it will do much for a writer, will not do everything. Indeed, Bolingbroke's splendid diction frequently serves to exhibit in strong relief the crudity and shallowness of his matter, as jewels set off deformity.-COLLINS, JOHN CHURTON, 1886, Bolingbroke, A Historical Study, and Voltaire in England, p. 208. His boasted style, though unquestionably lucid, is slipshod and full of platitudes, grandiloquent and yet ineffectual. Criticism now merely smiles at the author's impudent assumption of the airs of a great political philosopher.GOSSE, EDMUND, 1888, A History of Eighteenth Century Literature, p. 174. A work important equally as a historical document and as a model of style. Chesterfield said that until he read that tract he did not know what the English language was capable of.-PAYNE, E. J., ed., Select Works of Burke, vol. I, p. xvl. GENERAL Lord Bolingbroke is something superior to anything I have seen in human nature. You know I don't deal much in hyperboles: I quite think him what I say.-Lord Bolingbroke is much the best writer of the age. -Nobody knows half the extent of his excellencies, but two or three of his most intimate friends. Whilst abroad, he wrote "A consolation to a man in exile;" so much in Seneca's style, that, was he living now among us, one should conclude that he had written every word of it. He also wrote several strictures on the Roman affairs (something like what Montesquieu published afterwards) among which there were many excellent observations.-POPE, ALEXANDER, 173436, Spence's Anecdotes, ed. Singer, p. 127. I am solicitous to see Lord Bolingto see Lord Bolingbroke's Works. All the writings I have seen of his appeared to me to be copied from the French eloquence. I mean a poor or trite thought dressed in pompous language.-MONTAGU, LADY MARY WORTLEY, 1749, Letter to the Countess of Bute, Aug. 22. The same sad morn to church and state Black as the whirlwinds of the north, The works of the late Lord Bolingbroke are just published, and have plunged me into philosophical studies; which hitherto I have not been much used to, or delighted with; convinced of the futility of those researches: but I have read his Philosophical Essay upon the extent of human knowledge, which, by the way, makes two large quartos and a half. He there shows very clearly, and with most splendid eloquence, what the human mind can and cannot do; that our understandings are wisely calculated for our place in this planet, and for the link which we form in the universal chain of things; but that they are by no means capable of that degree of knowledge which our curiosity makes us search after, and which our vanity makes us often believe we arrive at.-CHESTERFIELD, PHILIP DORMER STANHOPE EARL, 1754, Jan. 15, Letters to his Son. To this indeed I could say, and it is all that I could say, that my Lord Bolingbroke was a great genius, sent into the world for great and astonishing purposes: that the ends, as well as means of actions in such personages, are above the comprehension of the vulgar. That his life was one scene of the wonderful throughout. That, as the temporal happiness, the civil liberties and properties of Europe, were the game of his earliest youth, there could be no sport so adequate to the entertainment of his advanced age as the eternal and final happiness of all mankind.-FIELDING, HENRY, 1754, Comment on Lord Bolingbroke's Essays. Before the Philosophical works of Bolingbroke had appeared, great things were expected from the leisure of a man, who, from the splendid scene of action in which his talents had enabled him to make so conspicuous a figure, had retired to employ those talents in the investigation of truth. Philosophy began to congratulate herself upon such a proselyte from the world of business, and hoped to have extended her power under the auspices of such a leader. In the midst of these pleasing expectations, the works themselves at last appeared in full body, and with great pomp. Those who searched in them for new discoveries in the mysteries of nature; those who expected something which might explain or direct the operations of the mind; those who hoped to see morality illustrated and enforced; those who looked for new helps to society and government; those who desired to see the characters and passions of mankind delineated; in short, all who consider such things as philosophy, and require some of them at least in every philosophical work, all these were certainly disappointed; they found the landmarks of science precisely in their former places: and they thought they received but a poor recompense for this disappointment, in seeing every mode of religion attacked in a lively manner, and the foundation of every virtue, and of all government, sapped with great art and much |