efforts. But this pretended virtue proceeds from personal malice and from disappointed ambition. There is not a man amongst them whose particular aim I am not able to ascertain, and from what motive they have entered into the lists of opposition.' Proceeding to consider the articles of accusation which they had brought against him, and which they had not thought fit to reduce to specific charges, he spoke of foreign affairs first, and complained of the way in which they had managed the question, by blending numerous treaties and complicated negotiations into one general mass by stigmatising the whole diplomacy of Europe for thirty years past, and making him accountable for all its shiftings and changings, and all its mischiefs and errors. 'To form a fair and candid judgment,' said he, 'it becomes necessary not to consider the treaties merely insulated; but to advert to the time in which they were made, to the circumstances and situation of Europe when they were made,-to the peculiar situation in which I stand,—and to the power which I possessed. I am called, repeatedly and insidiously, prime and sole minister. Admitting, however, for the sake of argument, that I am prime and sole minister in this country, am I, therefore, prime and sole minister of all Europe? Am I answerable for the conduct of other countries as well as for

that of my own? Many words are not wanting to show that the particular views of each Court occasioned the dangers which affected the public tranquillity, yet the whole is charged to my account. Nor is this sufficient; whatever was the conduct of England, I am equally arraigned. If we maintained ourselves in peace, and took no share in foreign transactions, we are reproached for tameness and pusillanimity. If, on the contrary, we interfered in the disputes, we are called Don Quixotes and dupes to all the world. If we contracted guarantees, it was asked, why is the nation wantonly burthened? If guarantees were declined, we were reproached with having no allies.""

After analysing the charges against his foreign policy, Walpole replied to Shippen's charges against his administration of the sinking fund; and he showed that, within the last sixteen or seventeen years, no less than eight millions of the national debt had been actually discharged by the new application of that fund, and that at least seven millions had been taken from that fund and applied to the relief of the agricultural interest by the diminution of the land-tax. As to the South Sea scheme, it was no project of

his; and he asked whether he had not been called on by the voice of the King and the unanimous voice of the nation to remedy the fatal effects produced by it. He proceeded with these queries:-"Was I not placed at the head of the Treasury when the revenues were in the greatest confusion? Is credit revived? Does it not now flourish? Is it not at an incredible height? and, if so, to whom must that circumstance be attributed? Has not tranquillity been preserved at home, notwithstanding a most unreasonable and violent opposition? Has not trade flourished?" As to the conduct of the war, he said, "As I am neither admiral nor general, as I have nothing to do with either our navy or army, I am sure I am not answerable for the prosecution of it. But, were I to answer for everything, no fault could, I think, be found with my conduct in the prosecution of this war.

If our attacks upon the enemy were too long delayed, or if they have not been so vigorous or so frequent as they ought to have been, those only are to blame who have for so many years been haranguing against standing armies; for without a sufficient number of regular troops in proportion to the numbers kept up by our neighbours, I am sure we can neither defend ourselves nor offend our enemies." In concluding his eloquent defence, he said,-"What have been the effects of the corruption, ambition, and avarice with which I am so abundantly charged? Have I ever been suspected of being corrupted? A strange phenomenon; a corrupter himself not corrupt! Is ambition imputed to me? Why, then, do I still continue a commoner? I, who refused a white staff and a peerage. I had, indeed, like to have forgotten the little ornament about my shoulders (the ribbon of the Order of the Garter) which gentlemen have so repeatedly mentioned in terms of sarcastic obloquy. But, surely, though this may be regarded with envy or indignation in another place, it cannot be supposed to raise any resentment in this house, where many may be pleased to see those honours which their ancestors have worn restored again to the Commons. Have I given any symptoms of an avaricious disposition? Have I obtained any grants from the Crown since I have been placed at the head of the Treasury? Has my conduct been different from that which others in the same station would have followed? Have I acted wrong in giving the place of auditor to my son, and in providing for my own family? I trust that their advancement will not be

imputed to me as a crime, unless it shall be proved that I placed them in offices of trust and responsibility for which they were unfit. But while I unequivocally deny that I am sole and prime minister, and that to my influence and direction all the measures of government must be attributed, yet I will not shrink from the responsibility which attaches to the post I have the honour to hold; and should, during the long period in which I have sat upon this bench, any one step taken by government be proved to be either disgraceful or disadvantageous to the nation, I am ready to hold myself accountable. To conclude, sir, though I shall always be proud of the honour of any trust or confidence from his Majesty, yet I shall always be ready to remove from his councils and presence when he thinks fit; and therefore I should think myself very little concerned in the event of the present question, if it were not for the encroachment that will thereby be made upon the prerogatives of the Crown. But I must think that an address to his Majesty to remove one of his servants, without so much as alleging any particular crime against him, is one of the greatest encroachments that was ever made upon the prerogatives of the Crown; and therefore, for the sake of my master, without any regard for my own, I hope that all those that have a due regard for our constitution, and for the rights and prerogatives of the Crown, without which our constitution cannot be preserved, will be against this motion."

Walpole's majority against Sandys was decisive, but it was his last great victory. He himself told his intimate friends that he felt that his opponents must in the end prevail against him. As doubts began to prevail as to the stability of his power, the mean and the timorous among his adherents began to fly from him.

With all the influence of the Crown and of his own wealth, both of which he unhesitatingly used, the next elections were unfavourable. Questions as to controverted elections, which were then not of law but of party, were decided in favour of the opposition. On the 9th of February, 1742, he was created Earl of Orford, and on the 11th he resigned.

The attempt at prosecution for alleged corruption which was made against him came, as before mentioned, to an utter failure. Walpole retained his influence with the King to the last; and his advice was frequently sought by persons of the highest station. He did not long survive the loss of office. He died on the 18th of

N

March, 1745, in the sixty-ninth year of his age, of one of the cruelest maladies to which the human frame is subject, and which he bore to the last with unexampled calmness and fortitude.

Lord Brougham, in his "Historical Sketches of Statesmen," thus concludes his admirably drawn character of this great minister:-"To hold up such men as Walpole in the face of the world as the model of a wise, a safe, an honest ruler, becomes the most sacred duty of the impartial historian; and as has been said of Cicero and of eloquence, by a great critic, that statesman may feel assured that he has made progress in the science to which his life is devoted who shall heartily admire the public character of Walpole."

LORD BOLINGBROKE.

Ir has been said that Lord Bolingbroke's ambition was to be the modern Alcibiades,-to be at once pre-eminent for excess in every sensual pleasure, and for surpassing energy in ruling a nation's councils. This parallel between the youthful Bolingbroke and the son of Clinias in the earlier part of his career is a true one. It might have been added, that each loved to talk of, but not to practise philosophy; that each was a contemner of his country's creed; and that Bolingbroke's patriotism, like that of Alcibiades, was measured by the extent to which he thought his country's prosperity was likely to promote his own personal aggrandizement. To the high military renown of the Athenian, Bolingbroke can offer no counterpart; but, on the other hand, he was far his superior in eloquence, and in intellectual ascendancy over his contemporaries in a highly intellectual age.

Henry St. John, afterwards Viscount Bolingbroke, was the son of Sir Henry St. John, Baronet, of the ancient family of that name. He was born at the family mansion at Battersea, in Surrey, in 1678. His mother died early; and, as he was the only son by his father's first marriage, he inherited a good estate in Wiltshire, which had been settled on his mother and her issue, and thus acquired an ample independent fortune early in life, though his father lived to an extreme old age.

Most unfortunately for Bolingbroke, his early childhood was passed in the house of his grandfather, Sir Walter St. John, and

8 Lord Mahon's History, vol. i. p. 35.

under the care and tuition of a fanatically puritanical grandmother, and a still more fanatically puritanical Presbyterian preacher, Daniel Burgess. By their mistaken zeal little Henry St. John was daily drugged with the prolix formulas of dull devotion. "I was obliged," he says in part of his writings, "I was obliged, while yet a boy, to read over the commentaries of Dr. Manton, whose pride it was to have made a hundred and nineteen sermons on the hundred and nineteenth Psalm." He in another passage says of this Nonconformist polemic, whose works were made the compulsory staple of his early studies, "Dr. Manton, who taught my youth to yawn, and prepared me to be a high Churchman, that I might never hear him read, nor read him more."

Unhappily the repulsive dogmas of Burgess, Manton, and his grandmother, did more than make Bolingbroke a non-Presbyterian. By a re-action, of which far too many instances might be cited, the quick and high-spirited boy through an injudicious cramming with the doctrines and ritual of a single sect conceived a prejudice against all revealed religion whatsoever. They, who teach children, should always remember that a clever child has a very keen eye for the ridiculous; and that the contempt which such a child acquires for the awkward or silly teacher, even of truth, is easily extended to the truth itself; which becomes thus associated in the pupil's mind with ludicrous or loathsome recollections of the unlucky preceptor, and is fancied to be folly because the child first heard it from a fool.

After having passed some years under this dreary domestic discipline, young St. John was sent to Eton. Here, as afterwards at Christ Church, Oxford, the brilliancy of his genius commanded the admiration both of his fellow-students and his academic rulers. Irregular in everything, he never amassed such ample stores of sound learning as distinguished some of the scholars of his age. With the Greek classics his acquaintance was never more than superficial; but he was extensively and accurately conversant with the Latin writers, and he added to his classical accomplishments the unusual merit of a thorough knowledge of the best writers in his own and other modern languages. He devoted much time and thought to metaphysics-a study which he rightly thought absolutely essential to the man who seeks to make the minds of others acknowledge his own mind's dominion. He was well read in ancient and a consummate master of modern history. He had