The character of the Duke of Marlborough is one which ought to be especially attractive to the authors of romance and the lovers of strong, bold portrait-painting. One peculiar difficulty, however, a romancist would have in dealing with Marlborough--he could hardly venture to paint Marlborough as nature and fortune made him. The romancist would find himself compelled to soften and to modify many of the distinctive traits of Marlborough's character, in order that he might not seem the mere inventor of a human paradox, in order that he might not appear to be indulging in the fantastic and the impossible. Pope has called Bacon "the wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind," but Bacon was not greater in his own path than Marlborough in his, and Bacon's worst meannesses were nobility itself compared with some of Marlborough's political offences. Marlborough started in life with almost every advantage that man could have--with genius, with boundless courage, with personal beauty, with favoring friends. From his early youth he had been attached to James the Second and James the Second's court. One of Marlborough's {23} biographers even suggests that the Duchess of York, James's first wife, was needlessly fond of young Churchill. The beautiful Duchess of Cleveland--she of whom Pepys said "that everything she did became her"--was passionately in love with Marlborough, and, according to some writers, gave him his first start in life when she presented him with five thousand pounds, which Marlborough, prudent then as ever, invested in an annuity of five hundred a year. Burnet said of him that "he knew the arts of living in a court beyond any man in it; he caressed all people with a soft and obliging deportment, and was always ready to do good offices." His only personal defect was in his voice, which was shrill and disagreeable. He was, through all his life, avaricious to the last degree; he grasped at money wherever he could get it; he took money from women as well as from men. A familiar story of the time represents another nobleman as having been mistaken for the Duke of Marlborough by a mob, at a time when Marlborough was unpopular, and extricating himself from the difficulty by telling the crowd he could not possibly be the Duke of Marlborough, first, because he had only two guineas in his pocket, and next, because he was perfectly ready to give them away. Marlborough had received the highest favors from James the Second, but he quitted James in the hour of his misfortunes, only, however, it should be said, to return secretly to his service at a time when he was professing devotion to William the Third. He betrayed each side to the other. In the same year, and almost in the same month, he writes to the Elector at Hanover and to the Pretender in France, pouring forth to each alike his protestations of devotion. "I shall be always ready to hazard my fortune and my life for your service," he tells the Elector.