have been impeached who, by their blundering and obstinacy, brought about the armed resistance and the final independence of the North American colonies. It is curious, in our eyes, to find Oxford defending his conduct on the ground that he had simply obeyed the positive orders of his sovereign. The minister would run more risk of impeachment, in our days, who declared that he had acted in some great public crisis simply in obedience to his sovereign's orders, than if he were to stand accountable for the greatest errors, the grossest blunders, committed on the judgment and on the responsibility of himself and his colleagues. Oxford was committed to the Tower, whither he went escorted by an immense popular procession of his admirers, who cheered vociferously for him and for High-Church together. He may now be said to drop out of our history altogether. He was destined to linger in long confinement, almost like one forgotten by friends and enemies. We shall have to tell afterwards how he petitioned for a trial, and was brought to trial, and in what fashion he came to be acquitted by his peers. The remainder of his life he passed in happy quietude among his books and curious manuscripts; the books and manuscripts which formed the original stock of the Harleian Library, afterwards completed by his son. Harley lived until 1724, and was not an old man even then--only sixty-three. It is not necessary that in this work we should concern ourselves much more about him. Despite all the {114} praises of his friends, some of them men of the highest intellectual gifts, like Swift and Pope, there does not seem to have been any great quality, intellectual or moral, in Harley. He had a narrow and feeble mind; he was incapable of taking a large view of anything; he was selfish and deceitful; although it has to be said that sometimes that which men called deceit in him was but a lack of the capacity to look straight before him and make up his mind. He often led astray those who acted with him merely because his own confusion of intellect and want of defined purpose were leading himself astray. Perhaps the most dignified passage in his life was that which showed him calmly awaiting the worst in London, when men like Bolingbroke and Ormond had chosen to seek safety in flight. Yet even the course which he took in this instance seems to have been rather the result of indecision than of independent self-sufficing courage and resolve. He does not appear to have been able to decide upon anything until the time had passed when movement of any kind would have availed, and so he remained where he was. Many a man has gained credit for courage, and has seemed to surround himself with dignity, because at a moment of alarm, when others did this or that, he was unable quite to make up his mind as to what he ought to do, and so did nothing, and let the world go by. [Sidenote: 1715--Sir Henry St. John]