Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, was in his way as great a man as the Duke of Marlborough. At the time we are now describing he seemed to have passed through a long, a varied, and a brilliant career, and yet he had only arrived at the age when public men in England now begin to be regarded as responsible politicians. He was in his thirty-sixth year. The career that had prematurely begun was drawing to its premature close. He had climbed to his highest position; he is Prime-minister of England, and has managed to get rid of his old colleague and rival, Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford. Bolingbroke had almost every gift and grace that nature and fortune could give. Three years before this Swift wrote to Stella, "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 greatest orator in the House of Commons, admirable conversation, good nature and good manners, generous, and a despiser of money." Yet, as in the fairy story, the benign powers which had combined to endow him so richly had withheld the one gift which might have made all the rest of {27} surpassing value, and which being denied left them of little account. If Bolingbroke had had principle he would have been one of the greatest Englishmen of any time. His utter want of morality in politics, as well as in private life, proved fatal to him; he only climbed high in order to fall the lower. He was remarkable for profligacy even in that heedless and profligate time. Voltaire, in one of his letters, tells a story of a famous London courtesan who exclaimed to some of her companion nymphs on hearing that Bolingbroke had been made Secretary of State, "Seven thousand guineas a year, girls, and all for us!" Even if the story be not true it is interesting and significant as an evidence of the sort of impression which Bolingbroke had made upon his age. It was his glory to be vicious; he was proud of his orgies. He liked to be known as a man who could spend the whole night in a drunken revel, and the afternoon in preparing some despatch on which the fortunes of his country or the peace of the world might depend. The sight of a beautiful woman could turn him away for the time from the gravest political purposes. He was ready at such a moment to throw anything over for the sake of the sudden love-chase which had come in his way. He bragged of his amours, and boasted that he had never failed of success with any woman who seemed to him worth pursuing. Like Faust, he loved to reel from desire to enjoyment, and from enjoyment back again into desire. Bolingbroke was the first of a great line of parliamentary debaters who have made for themselves a distinct place in English history, and whose rivals are not to be found in the history of any other parliament. It is difficult at this time to form any adequate idea of Bolingbroke's style as a speaker or his capacity for