A most inadequate opinion would be formed of Marlborough's mental character, if his military exploits alone were taken into consideration. Like all other intellects of the first order, he was equally capable of great achievements in peace as in war, and shone forth with not less lustre in the deliberations of the cabinet, or the correspondence of diplomacy, than in directing columns on the field of battle, or tracing out the line of approaches in the attack of fortified towns. Nothing could exceed the judgment and address with which he reconciled the jarring interests, and smoothed down the rival pretensions, of the coalesced cabinets. The danger was not so pressing as to unite their rival governments, as it afterwards did those of the Grand Alliance in 1813, for the overthrow of Napoleon; and incessant exertions, joined to the highest possible diplomatic address, judgment of conduct, and suavity of manner, were required to prevent the coalition, on various occasions during the course of the war, from falling to pieces. As it was, the intrigues of Bolingbroke and the Tories in England, and the ascendency of Mrs Masham in the Queen's bedchamber councils, at last counterbalanced all his achievements, and led to a peace which abandoned the most important objects of the war, and was fraught, as the event has proved, with serious danger to the independence and even existence of England. His winter campaign at the Allied courts, as he himself said, always equalled in duration, and often exceeded in importance and difficulty, that in summer with the enemy; and nothing is more certain, than that if a man of less capacity had been entrusted with the direction of its diplomatic relations, the coalition would have soon broken up without having accomplished any of the objects for which the war had been undertaken, from the mere selfishness and dissensions of the cabinets by whom it was conducted.