Born, in London, 1678; baptized 10 Oct. Educated at Eton. Married (i), Frances Winchcombe, 1700. M.P. for Wootton-Bassett, Dec. 1701. Hon. D.D., Oxford, 1702. Sec. for War, 1704. Re-elected M.P. for Wootton-Bassett, 1705. Sec. of State, 1710–14. M.P. for Berkshire, Oct. 1710. Created Viscount Bolingbroke and Baron St. John of Lydiard Tregoze, 7 July 1712. Sec. of State to Pretender, July 1714 to 1716. Abandoned Jacobite Cause, 1716. Wife died, Nov. 1718. Married (ii), Mme. Marie Claire de Villette, May 1720. Restored to favour at English Court, 1723. Resumed political life. Contrib. to “The Craftsman,” 1727–34. In later years spent much time in France. Political career ended, 1740. Died, in London, 12 Dec. 1751. Buried at Battersea. Works: “Letter to the ‘Examiner’” (Anon.), 1710; “Considerations upon the Secret History of the White Staff” (anon.; attrib. to Bolingbroke), 1714; “The Public Spirit of the Whigs” (anon.; with Swift), 1714; “The Representation of the Lord Viscount Bolingbroke” (anon.; attrib. to Bolingbroke), 1715; “Letter … to the Dean of St. Patrick’s” (anon.), 1715; “The Occasional Writer” (anon.), 1727; “Observations on the Public Affairs of Great Britain” (under pseud.: “W. Raleigh”), 1729: “The Craftsman Extraordinary” (3 pts.; anon.), 1729; “Letter to Caleb Danvers” (under pseud.: “John Trott”), 1730; “A Final Answer to the Remarks on the Craftsman’s Vindication” (anon.), 1731; “The Freeholder’s Political Catechism” (from “The Craftsman”), 1733; “The Idea of a Patriot King” (anon.), [1735?]; “A Dissertation upon Parties” (from “The Craftsman”), 1735 (2nd edn. same year); “Good Queen Anne Vindicated” (anon.), 1748; “A Collection of Political Tracts” (anon.), 1748; “Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism” (anon.), 1749; “A Familiar Letter to the most impudent man living” (anon.), 1749. Posthumous: “Letters on the Study and Use of History” (2 vols.), 1752; “Reflections concerning Innate Moral Principles,” 1752; “Letters to Dr. Jonathan Swift,” 1752; “Letter to Sir W. Wyndham,” 1753; “Reflections on the State of the Nation,” 1753; “Introductory Letter to Pope,” 1753; “Letters and Correspondence,” ed. by G. Parke (4 vols.), 1798. Collected Works: ed. by D. Mallet (5 vols.), 1754. Life: by T. Macknight, 1863.

Personal

  I think Mr. St. John the greatest young man I ever knew: wit, capacity, beauty, quickness of apprehension, good learning, and an excellent taste; the best orator in the House of Commons, admirable conversation, good nature, and good manners: generous, and a despiser of money. His only fault is talking to his friends in way of complaint of too great a load of business, which looks a little like affectation; and he endeavours too much to mix the fine gentleman and man of pleasure with the man of business. What truth and sincerity he may have I know not…. He turns the whole parliament, who can do nothing without him.

  I am extremely glad to hear that my Lord Treasurer takes care of his health. I hope he will continue to do so; for though I am a poor, discarded mistress, yet my best wishes shall always attend his lordship. I beg my most humble service to him and his lady.

  Oxford was removed on Tuesday: the queen died on Sunday. What a world is this! and how does fortune banter us!

  And so poor Harry is turned out from being Secretary of State, and the seals are given to Mar; and they use poor Harry most unmercifully and call him knave and traitor, and God knows what. I believe all poor Harry’s fault was that he could not play his part with a grave enough face; he could not help laughing now and then at such kings and queens.

  It is necessary that I should make you share my delight at a journey I have made to La Source, the abode of Lord Bolingbroke and Madame de Villette. I have found in this eminent Englishman all the learning of his country, and all the politeness of ours. I have never heard our language spoken with more energy and justice. This man, who has been all his life immersed in pleasure and in business, has, however, found time for learning everything, and retaining everything. He is as well acquainted with the history of the ancient Egyptians as with that of England. He knows Virgil as well as Milton. He loves the poetry of England, France, and Italy; but he loves them differently, because he discerns perfectly the difference of their genius.

  Though you have not signed your name, I know you: you are an infamous fellow, a perjured, ungrateful, unfaithful rascal … of so profligate a character, that in your prosperity, nobody envied you, and in your disgrace nobody pities. You were in the interests of France and of the Pope, as hath appeared by your writings, and you went out of the way to save yourself from the gallows. You have no abilities; you are an emancipated slave, a proscribed criminal, and an insolvent debtor. You went out of the way to save yourself from the gallows, and Herostratus and Nero were not greater villains than you. You have been a traitor and should be used like one. And I love my master so well that I will never advise him to use you, lest you should jostle me out of my employment. I know you to be so hot-headed that when you read this you will vent all your malice against me. But do I not value it, for I would rather have you my enemy than my friend. Change your name and be as abusive and scurrilous as you please, I shall find you out. You may change to a flame, a lion, a bull, or a bear, I shall know you, baffle you, conquer you, and contemn you. All your opposition will redound to my honour and glory.

  Lord Bolingbroke is one of the politest as well as greatest men in the world.—He appeared careless in his talk of religion.—In this he differed from Fenelon: Lord Bolingbroke outshines you, but then holds himself in, and reflects some of his own light, so as to make you appear the less inferior to him.

  I would never be acquainted with Lord Bolingbroke, because I always looked upon him as a vile man.

  As to the Lord Bolingbroke’s general character, it was so mixed that he had certainly some qualifications that the greatest men might be proud of, and many which the worst would be ashamed of: he had fine talents, a natural eloquence, great quickness, a happy memory, and very extensive knowledge; but he was vain, much beyond the general run of mankind, timid, false, injudicious, and ungrateful; elate and insolent in power, dejected and servile in disgrace: few people ever believed him without being deceived, or trusted him without being betrayed: he was one to whom prosperity was no advantage, and adversity no instruction: he had brought affairs to that pass that he was almost as much distressed in his private fortune as desperate in his political views, and was upon such a foot in the world that no king would employ him, no party support him, and few particulars defend him; his enmity was the contempt of those he attacked, and his friendship a weight and reproach to those he adhered to. Those who were most partial to him could not but allow that he was ambitious without fortitude, and enterprising without resolution; that he was fawning without insinuation, and insincere without art; that he had admirers without friendship, and followers without attachment; parts without probity, knowledge without conduct, and experience without judgment. This was certainly his character and situation; but since it is the opinion of the wise, the speculative, and the learned, that most men are born with the same propensities, actuated by the same passions, and conducted by the same original principles, and differing only in the manner of pursuing the same ends, I shall not so far chime in with the bulk of Lord Bolingbroke’s contemporaries as to pronounce he had more failings than any man ever had; but it is impossible to see all that is written, and hear all that is said of him, and not allow that if he had not a worse heart than the rest of mankind, at least he must have had much worse luck.

  In the name of God, whom I humbly adore, to whom I offer up perpetual thanksgiving, and to the order of whose providence I am cheerfully resigned. This is the last Will and Testament of me, Henry St. John, in the Reign of Queen Anne, and by her grace and favour Viscount Bolingbroke, after more than thirty years’ proscription, and after the immense losses I have sustained by unexpected events in the course of it, by the injustice and treachery of persons nearest to me, by the negligence of friends, and by the infidelity of servants, as my fortune is so reduced at this time that it is impossible for me to make such disposition and to give such ample legacies as I always intended.

  I believe I have lost an enemy in Lord Bolingbroke. I am sure. Religion, and the State, has. I question whether we shall see any of his MSS. His “Apology for his Public Conduct,” which I have seen, affects too many parties, to see the light; and his apology for his private opinions would shock the people too much, as dissolute as they are now grown. His “Letters concerning the use of reading History” (the best of his works, as his “Patriot King,” I think, is the worst), I suppose we shall see, because there are printed copies of it in several hands. It is in two volumes, 8vo. It was this work which occasioned his aversion to me. There is a dissertation in it against the canon of Scripture, which I told Mr. Pope was full of absurdities and false reasoning, and would discredit the work: and, at his desire, I drew up a paper of remarks upon it, which Lord Bolingbroke never forgave. He wrote an answer to it in great wrath and much acrimony; but, by the persuasion of a great man, suppressed it. It is possible it may now see the light.

  Lord Bolingbroke joined all the politeness, the manners, and the graces of a Courtier, to the solidity of a Statesman, and to the learning of a Pedant.

  The late lord Bolingbroke, and the lord Carteret, afterwards earl of Granville. But as I know not enough of them to be very particular in their characters, I shall only describe them as they were generally spoken of. They were universally esteemed of the greatest genius for parts and knowledge of any men of the age; the latter thought to be the better scholar, and to have formed his eloquence more upon the ancients, and to have more of their spirit in it, than the former, but the first was far the better writer, and had been a very lively and able speaker in both houses of parliament. He was thought to have more knowledge and skill in the affairs of Europe from his long experience abroad and intimacy there with men of the first rank for business and capacity. But neither of them were thought to know enough for the real temper and constitution of their own country, altho’ lord Bolingbroke wrote much on that subject, they were both of them of unbounded spirit and ambition, impatient of restraint, contemning the notion of equality with others in business, and even disdaining to be anything if not the first and highest in power. They were not famed for what is called personal courage, but in the conduct of affairs were deemed bold if not rash, and the lord Bolingbroke was of a temper to overturn kingdoms to make way for himself and his talents to govern the world; whilst the other in projecting the plans of his administration, thought much more of raising a great name to himself all over Europe, and having that continued by historians to all posterity, than of any present domestic popularity or renown whatsoever.

  Sir, he was a scoundrel and a coward: a scoundrel, for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality; a coward, because he had not resolution to fire it off himself, but left half a crown to a beggarly Scotchman, to draw the trigger after his death!

  I own I have small regard for Lord Bolingbroke as an author, and the highest contempt for him as a man. He came into the world greatly favored both by nature and fortune, blest with a noble birth, heir to a large estate, endowed with a strong constitution, and, as I have heard, a beautiful figure, high spirits, a good memory, and a lively apprehension, which was cultivated by a learned education: all these glorious advantages being left to the direction of a judgment stifled by unbounded vanity, he dishonored his birth, lost his estate, ruined his reputation, and destroyed his health, by a wild pursuit of eminence even in vice and trifles.

  There are some characters that seemed formed by Nature to take delight in struggling with opposition, and whose most agreeable hours are passed in storms of their own creating. The subject of the present sketch was, perhaps, of all others, the most indefatigable in raising himself enemies, to shew his power in subduing them; and was not less employed in improving his superior talents, than in finding objects on which to exercise their activity. His life was spent in a continual conflict of politics, and as if that was too short for the combat, he has left his memory as a subject of lasting contention…. Nature seemed not less kind to him in her external embellishments, than in adorning his mind. With the graces of an handsome person, and a face in which dignity was happily blended with sweetness, he had a manner of address that was very engaging. His vivacity was always awake, his apprehension was quick, his wit refined, and his memory amazing: his subtlety in thinking and reasoning was profound, and all these talents were adorned with an elocution that was irresistible…. In whatever light we view his character, we shall find him an object rather properer for our wonder, than our imitation, more to be feared than esteemed, and gaining our admiration without our love. His ambition ever aimed at the summit of power, and nothing seemed capable of satisfying his immoderate desires but the liberty of governing all things without a rival. With as much ambition, as great abilities, and more acquired knowledge than Cæsar, he wanted only his courage to be as successful; but the schemes his head dictated, his heart often refused to execute: and he lost the ability to perform, just when the great occasion called for all his efforts to engage.

  The eloquence and ostentation of Bolingbroke could never impose on Arbuthnot: he told his son (whom I once had the honour to converse with at Richmond), that he knew Bolingbroke was an infidel, and a worthless vain man.

  Mr. Burke told me a few days ago that the first Lord Lyttleton informed him, that Lord Bolingbroke never wrote down any of his works but dictated them to a secretary. This may account for their endless tautology. In company, according to Lord Lyttleton, he was very eloquent, speaking with great fluency and authority on every subject, and generally in the form of harangue rather than colloquial table talk. His company all looked up to him, and very few dared to interrupt or contradict him.

  Henry lord Bolingbroke was one of the great ornaments of the beginning of the present century. He has been admired as a statesman, an orator, a man of letters and a philosopher. Pope, in the eagerness of his reverence and devotion, foresaw the time when his merits would be universally acknowledged, and assured the world that the “sons” of his personal adversaries, would “blush” for the malignity and injustice of “their fathers.” But Pope, though a poet, was no prophet. We every day hear Bolingbroke spoken of by one man or another, with as much contempt as could have been expressed by the most rancorous of his political rivals.

  Bolingbroke had beheld the decay of Dryden, and the rise of Pope. It was his fortune to view also the progress of, perhaps, a yet more extraordinary genius. Voltaire was now giving early proofs of those talents which were afterwards to astonish his age in their development, and to disappoint it by their perversion. The English philosopher seems to have been peculiarly successful in winning the confidence and affections of the young. He was regarded by Voltaire with scarcely less esteem and admiration than by Pope. In his society these two illustrious men felt and acknowledged a superior genius; and if he had no claim to excellence in poetry, the art in which they were so pre-eminent, he surpassed them both in the philosophy which they so admired…. Bolingbroke’s private, like his public life, offers much subject both for praise and blame. His passions were as fiery as his genius; and in his youth he disdained to control the one, or to regulate the other. Although eminently gifted with those shining qualities which captivate and ensnare, he took little pains to improve the opportunities he possessed; and his intrigues were rather numerous than select. He was not very fastidious in choosing his companions of either sex; but no man was more careful in the selection of a friend. There were few men whom he ever admitted to this distinction, and of these none ever deserted or betrayed him. The ambition which would allow him to brook no equal in the administration of government, prompted him to domineer in private: his friendship was offered only to those whose kindred genius marked them as his equals, and even by these he could never believe that he was loved until he was implicitly obeyed. The estimation in which his friendship was held, appears from the readiness with which the superiority he assumed was conceded: even Pope and Swift owned in him a master.

  He looked through the characters of others with a keen and searching eye. His eloquence, both commanding and rewarding the attention of his hearers, was ready, full, and gushing; according to his own beautiful illustration, it flowed like a stream that is fed by an abundant spring, and did not merely spout forth, like a frothy water, on some gaudy day. His genius was vast and lofty, yet able to contract itself at will—scarcely anything too great for its grasp, and scarcely anything too minute for its care. With such splendid abilities, such active ambition, he might have been the greatest and most useful statesman of his, or, perhaps, of any age. But he utterly wanted virtue. He was no believer in revealed religion, whose tenets he attempted to sap in his writings, and disregarded in his life. He had early rushed into pleasure with an eagerness and excess that might have been forgiven his youth and his ardent passions, had he not afterwards continued them from a miserable personal vanity. He aimed at being the modern Alcibiades—a man of pleasure at the same time as a man of business; sitting up one night to reel at a drunken orgy,—sitting up the next to compose a despatch on which the fate of Europe might hang; at one hour dealing forth his thunderbolts of eloquence to the awe-struck senate,—at another whispering soft words at the ear of yielding beauty! In this unworthy combination he lost all dignity of mind. There ceased to be any consistency between his conduct and his language. No man ever spoke more persuasively of the fatigues of business, yet no man was ever more fretful and uneasy, in retirement. For him, activity was as necessary as air for others. When excluded from public life, there were no intrigues, however low and grovelling, to which he did not stoop in order to return to it. Yet all his writings breathe the noblest principles of independence.

  The opinions of posterity as to his character are likely to be as much divided as were those of his contemporaries; and the safe conclusion that can be arrived at is, that he possessed an extraordinary mixture of good and evil, of greatness and meanness, of that which ennobles, as well as that which disgraces morality…. His extraordinary talents forced themselves into general notice; his prodigious strength of memory and quick apprehension, his dashing and brilliant style, was the admiration of his friends, and his social disposition rendered their affection equal to their admiration. Formed to excel in whatever he might undertake, he soon became as notorious for his excesses, as he was afterwards eminent for his genius and learning.

  He lived in the centre of intrigues which were to shake thrones, and perhaps to form them. He became habituated to the idea that everything could be achieved by dexterity, and that there was no test of conduct except success. To dissemble and to simulate; to conduct confidential negotiations with contending powers and parties at the same time; to be ready to adopt any opinion and to possess none; to fall into the public humour of the moment and to evade the impending catastrophe; to look upon every man as a tool, and never to do anything which had not a definite though circuitous purpose,—these were his political accomplishments; and, while he recognised them as the best means of success, he found in their exercise excitement and delight. To be the centre of a maze of manœuvres was his empyrean…. Recklessness with him was a principle of action. He trusted always to his fertile expedients if he failed, and ran the risk in the meanwhile of paramount success—the fortune of those who are entitled to be rash. With all his audacity, which was nearly equal to his craft, he had no moral courage.

  With two exceptions,… Lord Bolingbroke came the nearest of all parliamentary orators who have been particularly recorded to the ideal of a fine rhetorician. It was no disadvantage to him that he was shallow, being so luminous and transparent; and the splendour of his periodic diction, with his fine delivery, compensated his defect in imagery.

  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 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.”

  In this English Alcibiades, what restless, but what rich vitality!

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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 end in disgrace, impotence, and scorn.

  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.

  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.”

  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 gaming-table or the “midnight modern conversation,” as Hogarth has immortalised such scenes, the debauchee became clear in council and prompt in action.

  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.

  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 dissimilarity to their own. In the statesmanship 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.

  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.

  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. His 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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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 administrative 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.”

The Idea of a Patriot King, 1735?

  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.

  This lord had strength and elevation of mind; but he was a sorry philosopher.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

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.

  I am solicitous to 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.

  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.

  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.

  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 ingenuity. What advantage do we derive from such writings? What delight can a man find in employing a capacity which might be usefully exerted for the noblest purposes, in a sort of sullen labour, in which, if the author could succeed, he is obliged to own, that nothing could be more fatal to mankind than his success?

  No Man of taste can read this noble Author, without being pleased with his manly Style, and strong Imagination. His Imagination appears to me his Characteristic; too much superior to the other Faculties of his mind; and at once the Source of his many Beauties as a Writer, and his many Extravagances as a Reasoner. As a Reasoner, I must place him very low in the learned World. I have hardly ever read an Author, even of the lowest Character, so inconsistent, not only with my Sentiments, which I could easily forgive, but with himself; so full of right Conclusions from wrong Premises, and wrong Conclusions from right Premises; so apt to imagine strongly, and to miscall it strong Reasoning; so sceptical in the midst of Evidence, and so dogmatical and confident in the absence of Evidence; so apt to mistake his own Importance as the Patron of a Cause, for the Importance, and Evidence of the Cause itself, in the View of others.

  With the most agreeable talents in the world, and with great parts, was neither happy nor successful. He wrote against the late king, who had forgiven him; against sir Robert Walpole, who did forgive him; against the Pretender and the clergy, who never will forgive him. He is one of our best writers; though his attacks on all governments and all religions (neither of which views he cared directly to own) have necessarily involved his style in a want of perspicuity. One must know the man before one can often guess his meaning. He has two other faults, which one should not expect in the same writer, much tautology, and great want of connexion.

  As a moralist therefore, Lord Bolingbroke, by having endeavoured at too much, seems to have done nothing: but as a political writer, few can equal and none can exceed him. And he was a practical politician, his writings are less filled with those speculative illusions, which are the result of solitude and seclusion. He wrote them with a certainty of their being opposed, sifted, examined, and reviled; he therefore took care to build them up of such materials, as could not be easily overthrown: they prevailed at the times in which they were written, they still continue to the admiration of the present age, and will probably last for ever.

  Mallet dreamt of getting golden mountains by Bolingbroke’s legacy; he was so sanguine in his expectations, that he rejected the offer of three thousand pounds tendered to him by Mr. Millar the bookseller, for the copy-right of that nobleman’s works; at the same time, he was so distress’d for cash, that he was forced to borrow money of this very bookseller to pay his stationer and printer…. Mallet heartily repented his refusal of Mr. Millar’s offer; for the first impression of his edition of Bolingbroke’s works was not sold off in twenty years.

  Though I may have recourse to this author, sometimes, for examples of style, it is his style only, and not his sentiments, that deserve praise. It is indeed my opinion, that there are few writings in the English language, which, for the matter contained in them, can be read with less profit of fruit, than Lord Bolingbroke’s works. His political writings have the merit of a very lively and eloquent style; but they have no other; being, as to the substance, the mere temporary productions of faction and party; no better, indeed, than pamphlets written for the day. His posthumous, or as they are called, his philosophical works, wherein he attacks religion, have still less merit; for they are as loose in the style as they are flimsy in the reasoning. An unhappy instance, this author is, of parts and genius so miserably perverted by faction and passion, that, as his memory will descend to posterity with little honour, so his productions will soon pass, and are, indeed, already passing into neglect and oblivion.

  His speculative effusions, notwithstanding their splendour of diction and graces of style, are not consulted as containing just axioms or practical precepts; except by those who wish to avail themselves of the laxity of his political tenets, and his affectation of recurring to first principles and abstract doctrines, for the purpose of substituting a capricious and theoretical system, in the place of a well defined and limited government.

  Lord Bolingbroke’s,… is a style of the highest order. The lofty, rhythmical, full-flowing eloquence of Cicero. Periods of just measure, their members proportioned, their close full and round. His conceptions, too, are bold and strong, his diction copious, polished and commanding as his subject. His writings are certainly the finest samples in the English language, of the eloquence proper for the Senate. His political tracts are safe reading for the most timid religionist, his philosophical, for those who are not afraid to trust their reason with discussions of right and wrong.

  With all the signal faults of his public character, with all the factiousness which dictated most of his writings, and the indefinite declamation or shallow reasoning which they frequently display, they have merits not always sufficiently acknowledged.

  Lord Bolingbroke, whom Pope idolized (and it pains me that all his idols are not mine) was a boastful empty mouther!

  The best test to use, before we adopt any opinion or assertion of Bolingbroke’s, is to consider whether in writing it he was thinking either of Sir Robert Walpole or of Revealed Religion…. On most other occasions he may be followed with advantage, as he always may be read with pleasure.

  These “Letters on History” bear strong testimony to the tenacity of their author’s memory, and to the extent of his reading. His quotations, which are so numerous that upon almost any other subject they would savour of pedantry, were drawn only from his memory and his commonplace book; he had scarcely any of the authors whom he mentions with him at Chantelou. This has indeed betrayed him into some few mistakes. There are several inaccurate quotations, and in more than one instance he has mistaken the name of his author. But these errors were seldom suffered to go unpunished…. Bolingbroke’s writings are characteristic of himself: the style of the author bears a close resemblance to the character of the man. Brilliant and imaginative, manly and energetic, his power of illustration never renders him frigid or bombastic. His energy never degenerates into coarseness. There is an elegance in his antithesis peculiarly his own; and if it occurs sometimes too frequently, the nervous sentiment it breathes tempts us to overlook the traces of art. His words are selected carefully, and combined with skill; nor is it easy to convict him of a tedious or ill-constructed sentence. But the peculiar charm in Bolingbroke’s style is the exact and beautiful propriety of his illustrations. This is characteristic of all his works, but it is more striking in his earlier productions.

  As a writer, Lord Bolingbroke is, I think, far too little admired in the present day. Nor is this surprising. His works naturally fail to please us from the false end which they always have in view, and from the sophistical arguments which they are, therefore, compelled to urge.

  His poetry is frigid and inharmonious; it never rises above mediocrity, and usually sinks below it…. Of the six poetical pieces which are known to be his production, it would be difficult to say which is the most deficient in merit. His own good sense, however,—added to the want of encouragement which his verses met with from his friend Pope, and the actual abuse which was heaped upon them by Swift,—appear to have early convinced him that his genius was ill-suited for poetry.

  Bolingbroke’s writings command respect from their mixture of clearness of exposition with power of argument. They form also the transition to the literature of the next age, in turning attention to history. Bolingbroke had great powers of psychological analysis, but he despised the study of it apart from experience. His philosophy was a philosophy of history. In his attacks on revelation we have the traces of the older philosophical school of deists; but in the consciousness that an historical, not a philosophical, solution must be sought to explain the rise of an historical phenomenon such as Christianity, he exemplifies the historic spirit which was rising, and anticipates the theological inquiry found in Gibbon; and, in his examination of the external historic evidence, both the documents by which the Christian religion is attested, and the effects of tradition in weakening historic data, he evinces traces of the influence of the historical criticism which had arisen in France under his friend Pouilly.

  Bolingbroke looks down with equally serene scorn upon priests, philosophers, and people. He is not the least anxious to refute divines by a scheme of atheistical philosophy. He refutes them by showing that he can conceive a God as well as they can, and that the God whom he conceives is one whose nature can by no possibility have any affinity with the nature of man; whom it is the most extravagant presumption for man to dream of knowing. Bolingbroke adds nothing to what Hobbes had said and Locke had implied, on the subject, except his own aristocratical air of confidence, and a little abuse of Cudworth, the Platonists and the Schoolmen. He tosses philosophical expositions about as Pope found him tossing the haycocks at his country seat, with infinite grace and condescension. The poet witnessed each performance with equal admiration. No ear could have detected more quickly than his the falsetto in these notes if he had not been bribed, as it was honourable to him that he should be, by an extravagant but real and quite disinterested affection for the musician.

  Had the manuscripts of Bolingbroke’s philosophical works been given to the flames, there would have been great expressions of regret from the intellectual world; and yet, although they were looked for with so much impatience, had they never been published at all, his reputation either as a writer or a philosopher would have lost nothing…. His published writings on the political controversies of his time still remain; and they will assist us to form a very correct, and even a favourable estimate of what we have lost. For, more than almost those of any other man who ever wrote, St. John’s literary works resemble spoken eloquence. They are clearly the compositions of an orator, who, being prevented from addressing an audience by word of mouth, uses the pen as his instrument, and writes what he would have spoken…. Their style is, both in its excellencies and defects, thoroughly oratorical; glowing, animated, vehement, and if never bombastic, frequently declamatory, tautological, and diffuse. Graceful and flowing as Bolingbroke in the best of his writings is, he not unfrequently tires the reader with repetitions and amplifications, to which, when set off by his fine person and pleasing intonations, an audience might always listen with interest and delight…. Though his memory was so tenacious, that he seldom forgot what he wished to remember, and allusions to the great authors of antiquity are prodigally scattered throughout his works, he never was a learned man. His information was, in many instances, obviously acquired at second hand; nor did he always make a judicious use of what he indirectly obtained. In his age it was customary to refer much more frequently than in ours to the ancient writers; and quotations and remarks which were then thought extremely clever are now considered only worthy of schoolboys. None of the writers of Queen Anne’s reign abound more in such pedantry than Bolingbroke; and it is more surprising to meet with it in his pages than in those of most of his contemporaries, because he was not so much a professed author as a statesman and a man of business.

  His irony is majestic, his lamentations are reserved and masculine. His graces of language are those which become an accomplished statesman. He is not a poet, and he takes from poets no ornament obsolete or far-fetched…. His quotations and his images harmonise with the character he assumes. His similes and illustrations are no wanton enrichments of fancy; they support the argument they adorn—like buttresses which, however relieved with tracery, add an air of solidity to the building against which they lean, and, in leaning, prop. Withal, he has been a man of the world’s hard business—a leader of party, a chief among the agencies by which opinion is moulded and action is controlled. And therefore, amidst his natural stateliness, there is an absence of pedantry—a popular and genial elegance. His sentences flow loose as if disdainful of verbal care. Yet throughout all their reigns the senatorial decorum. The folds of the toga are not arranged to show off the breadth of the purple hem; the wearer knows too well that, however the folds may fall, the hem cannot fail to be seen.

  Bolingbroke is now little more than a brilliant name, and all the beauties of his matchless style have been unable to preserve his philosophy from oblivion.

  In Pope’s eyes an indescribable charm attached to the society and personality of this unrepentant Alcibiades. As Bolingbroke discoursed to him on his system of natural theology, clear and shallow as the streamlet in the grotto where they sat, and communicated to him those Essays which he never had the courage to publish, the mind of his friend became imbued with enough of the facile lesson to make him in his own belief the disciple of an exhaustive system, while he was in reality only the acolyte of a sophist and a man of the world.

  He was much too passionate for philosophical speculation. The best metaphysics roused his anger at the first approach, and he stormed against doctrines he had not the patience to comprehend.

  On the whole, it may be said that the reader who, finding how much Bolingbroke was admired by his contemporaries, is led to study his works, will not find much to reward him, except a few happy sentences, such as “Don Quixote believed, but even Sancho doubted.”

  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, and 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 his style shows no traces. His ideas seem to clothe themselves spontaneously in their rich and varied garb. He had studied, as few Englishman of that day had studied, the masterpieces 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.

  Bolingbroke is seen at his best, I think, in his “Letter to Sir William Wyndham” (1752), which may be described as a chapter of autobiographical apologetics. But is he read now-a-days? Is he worth reading (except, of course, to the historical student)? His admirers are obliged to concede that, if he be read, it must be for the manner not the matter, the style not the thought; for his historical essays are “thin” in the extreme; his idea of “a Patriot King” is simply that of a patriarchal despot; and his attacks on Christianity would win no approving smile from a modern agnostic. As for his philosophy, you will find it in its most agreeable form in Pope’s “Essay on Man.” I am not sure that there is very much even in his style. It is unrelieved by felicitous images, and is seldom enriched by happy terms of expression; all that can be said of it is, that it flows easily and clearly, like a pellucid but shallow stream; that in attack it is generally animated, and in defence often dignified. As a man of letters, Bolingbroke owned his whilom reputation to his conspicuousness as a statesman; and as a statesman his influence largely depended, I think, on the attractiveness of his brilliant, restless, wayward, and ambitious personality.

  There is no doubt that, with the exception of the views expressed in “The Patriot King,” his ideas died with him. The slight influence exercised by his many writings after his death seems to prove the possession on his part of an immensely strong will…. Of the statesmen who are no longer with us there is no name more intimately connected with literature than that of Bolingbroke. There has certainly been no English statesman whose influence, whether for good or for evil, on the whole train of thought and consequently on the productions of two such men as dissimilar as were Pope and Voltaire, has been more marked. A very delightful volume might be written upon Bolingbroke as a man of letters. In an age singularly fertile in prose writers, who were remarkable for the elegance and lucidity of their style, Bolingbroke more than held his own. In an age distinguished for the production of exquisite skill in versification, Bolingbroke was considered competent to revise the proofs of one of the most renowned poems of the greatest master of style in the eighteenth century. In an age when epistolary correspondence, much of which were still regarded as models of letter-writing, was the fashion, Bolingbroke’s letters will bear comparison with the correspondence of Lady Mary Montague or with the letters of Pope. The patron of struggling authors, the friend and protector of Dryden, the intimate friend and companion of Pope, Voltaire, and Swift, an author of some of the most interesting political disquisitions ever written, Bolingbroke will be handed down to posterity as a distinguished member of that brotherhood of literary statesmen which includes such men as Burke and Canning, and in our own day has seen added to its ranks Lord Beaconsfield and Mr. John Morley, Lord Iddesleigh and Mr. Gladstone.

  He handled the great and difficult Instrument of written language with such freedom and copiousness, such vivacity and ease, that in spite of much literary foppery and falsetto, he ranks in all that musicians call execution, only below the three or four highest masters of English prose. Yet of all the characters in our history Bolingbroke must be pronounced to be most of a charlatan; of all the writing in our literature, his is the hollowest, the flashiest, the most insincere.

  The first George, though wholly illiterate, yet took it upon himself to despise Bolingbroke, philosopher though he was, and dismissed an elaborate effusion of his as “les bagatelles.” Here again the phrase sticks, and not even the beautiful type and lordly margins of Mallet’s edition of Lord Bolingbroke’s writings, or the stately periods of that nobleman himself, can drive the royal verdict out of my ears. There is nothing real about these writings save their colossal impudence.

  It may freely be granted that Bolingbroke’s style is in some respects vicious; that, as Mr. Gosse says, it is “grandiloquent, and yet ineffectual.” These faults affect unfavourably the emphasis of his paragraph; and yet, after every deduction, Bolingbroke is distinctly a modern paragrapher. He knows the value of the short sentence, though he does not use it freely enough. Only 13 per cent. of his sentences fall below the length of 15 words; yet he alternates long propositions and short ones, with telling effect. The unity of his paragraphs is generally unassailable. He looks to the transition between sentences, and, what was then more rare, to the transition between paragraphs. He balances sentences, sometimes to windy lengths, but does not let the coherence seriously suffer. He carefully eschews connectives, indeed rather too carefully. Above all he depends more on the paragraph than do his predecessors. He is always making sentences that are unintelligible except in the light of the larger unit. He delights, as Macaulay does, in a preliminary generalization so sweeping and so indefinite as to require a multitude of subsequent propositions to unravel the puzzle. He has deliberately adopted the paragraph unit, and it is evident that from the study of him some of the best English paragraphists, notably Burke and Macaulay, have their cue, slight as that cue is.

  Bolingbroke is one of the few men whose literary reputation has probably been enhanced by the fact that he is rarely read…. When from this career we turn to the literary achievement, the glamour is stript off. We cannot deny to him many high literary gifts. His prose style has the easy flow, the rotund and grandiloquent sound, which the habit of the orator gives. His arguments are always specious and often at first presentation persuasive. He sets forth his case with a wonderful harmony of illusion, even when that case is most palpably a perversion of the truth. He maintains without faltering or hesitation an attitude of proud and dignified patriotism, founded upon the fundamental principles of a consistent political creed: and we have only to think of his actual career to estimate the consummate skill of the actor in so doing. His display of reading—much of it necessarily superficial—has all the manner of one careless how he draws upon an inexhaustible store: and yet without a doubt, Bolingbroke relied upon his tact alone in skimming over the thinnest of ice in his copious allusions, and in affecting profound learning. But if his style is easy and flowing it is also tiresome in its tautology. His flowing sentences weary us by their lack of variety, and by the entire absence of the illustration which fancy or imagination might have brought to them. Above all he wants entirely that saving gift of humour which brightens literary controversies and keeps their savour fresh when the subjects have passed into oblivion. Against the approach of such humour Bolingbroke’s egotism and affectation set an impenetrable bar. He has not even that literary instinct which enabled such a man as Temple to refresh his reader by digressing into devious ways, and lingering on his road to give his imagination play.

  Bolingbroke, perhaps, may be left us, but it is impossible to be very thankful for Bolingbroke. That he was a great orator seems certain, though we have, as in the case of all English parliamentary orators till Burke, next to nothing to prove or disprove the fact. That in his brilliant youth he fascinated and dazzled men of letters from Dryden to Pope, is unquestionable. That he must have had some strange magnetism, as after times have called it, to account for his triumph over the services of Marlborough, the prudery of Anne, the practised wiles of Harley, may be taken for granted. His own day thought him great as a master of philosophy and of style. But a famous sentence, “Who now reads Bolingbroke?” shows how soon this glamour lost its effect; and though several attempts (mostly due to the whimsical fancy of Lord Beaconsfield for him) have of late been made to revive his fame, they have all failed. Nay, most of those who have begun to bless him have ended, if not exactly by cursing, yet with that faint praise the sense of which his adoring friend and bard knew so well. The fact is that whatever Bolingbroke may have been in his youth, before that Tory débâcle which his greed of power and party spirit did much to bring about, he was later very much of a sham. His Deism, picked up in France, was utterly shallow; his philosophy, in so far as it was not mere fashionable “philosophism,” was shallower still; and his very style was pinchbeck, French polish, veneer—not true metal or solid wood.

  It has often been remarked that his writings are substantially orations. Their style has been greatly admired. Chesterfield calls the style “infinitely superior to any one’s.” Chatham advises his nephew to get Bolingbroke by heart, for the inimitable beauty of his style as well as for the matter. The style, however, does not prevent them from being now exceedingly tiresome, except to persons of refined tastes. The causes are plain. His political theories are the outcome not of real thought, but of the necessities of his political relations. He was in a false position through life…. He emits brilliant flashes of perception rather than any steady light, and fails in the attempt to combine philosophical tone with personal ends. His dignified style, his familiarity with foreign politics, and with history especially as regarded by a diplomatist mainly interested in the balance of power, impressed his contemporaries. But his dignity prevents him from rivalling Swift’s hard hitting, on the one hand, while his philosophy is too thin on the other to bear a comparison with Burke.