It is hard to think of Bolingbroke, even in his more advanced years, as "nobly pensive," sitting and thinking, and certainly neither Bolingbroke nor any of Bolingbroke's closer political associates was exactly the sort of man who would have dared "to love his country and be poor." In Bolingbroke's latest years we hear of him as amusing himself by boasting to his second wife of his various successful amours, until at last the lady, weary of the repetition, somewhat contemptuously reminds him that however happy as a lover he may have been once, his days of love were now over, and the less he said about it the better. Nor was Pope less extravagant in his praise to Harley than to St. John. He says: If aught below the seats divine Can touch immortals, 'tis a soul like thine; A soul supreme, in each hard instance tried, Above all pain, all passion, and all pride, The rage of power, the blast of public breath, The lust of lucre, and the dread of death. These lines, it is right to remember, were addressed to Harley, not in his power, but after his fall. Even with that excuse for a friend's overcharged eulogy, they read like a satire on Harley rather than like his panegyric. Caricature itself could not more broadly distort the features of a human being than his poetic admirer has altered the lineaments of Oxford. Harley had been intriguing on both sides of the field. He professed devoted loyalty to the Queen and to her appointed successor, and he was at the same time coquetting, to put it mildly, with the Stuart family in France. Nothing surprises a reader more than the universal duplicity that seems to have prevailed in the days of Anne and of the early Georges. Falsehood appears to have been a recognized diplomatic {30} and political art. Statesmen, even of the highest rank and reputation, made no concealment of the fact that whenever occasion required they were ready to state the thing which was not, either in private conversation or in public debate. Nothing could exceed or excuse the boundless duplicity of Marlborough, but it must be owned that even William the Third told almost as many falsehoods to Marlborough as Marlborough could have told to him. At a time when William detested Marlborough, he yet occasionally paid him in public and in private the very highest compliments on his integrity and his virtue. Men were not then supposed or expected to speak the truth. A statesman might deceive a foreign minister or the Parliament of his own country with as little risk to his reputation as a lady would have undergone, in later days, who told a lie to the custom-house officer at the frontier to save the piece of smuggled lace in her trunk. [Sidenote: 1714--Harley]