No man ever spoke more disparagingly of Marlborough than his enemy, Lord Peterborough, though even _he_ did justice to Marlborough’s abilities; but Lord Peterborough was especially severe on the duke’s love of money. The latter spent wisely, the former squandered profusely, and cheated his heirs. The duke in the Bath-rooms, dunning a dean for sixpence, is not so degrading a picture as Peterborough, in the Bath market, cheapening commodities, and walking about in his blue ribbon and star, with a fowl in his hand and a cabbage or a cauliflower under either arm. Peterborough was lewd and sensual, vain, passionate, and inconstant, a mocker of Christianity, and a remorseless transgressor of the laws of God and man. He was superior to Marlborough only in one thing--in spelling. A poor boast. Compare the duke, leading a well-regulated life, and walking daily with his God, to Peterborough, whose only approaches to religion consisted in his once going to hear Penn preach, because he ‘liked to be civil to all religions,’ and in his saying of Fenelon that he was a delicious creature, but dangerous, because acquaintance with him was apt to make men pious! Marlborough’s favourite general, Cadogan, was one of the ornaments of the court of George and Caroline down to 1726. They had reason to regard him, for he was a staunch Whig, although, as a diplomatist, he perilled what he was commissioned to preserve. _His_ morality is evidenced in his remark made when some one enquired, on the committal of Atterbury to the Tower for Jacobite dealings, what should be done with the bishop? ‘Done with him!’ roared Cadogan; ‘throw him to the lions!’ Atterbury, on hearing of this meek suggestion, burst out with an explosion of alliterative fierceness, and denounced the earl to Pope ‘as a bold, bad, blundering, blustering, bloody bully!’ The episcopal sense of forgiveness was on a par with the sentiment of mercy which influenced the bosom of the soldier. But Marlborough’s social, severe, and domestic virtues were not asked for in the commanders of following years. Thus Macartney, despite the blood upon his hand, stained in the duel between the Duke of Hamilton and Lord Mohun, was made colonel of the twenty-first regiment six years previous to the Queen’s death. General Webb, who died two years previously, was thought nothing the worse for his thrasonic propensity, and was for ever boasting of his courage, and alluding to the four wounds he had received in the battle of Wynendael. ‘My dear general,’ said the Duke of Argyle, on one of these occasions, ‘I wish you had received a fifth--in your tongue; for then everybody else would have talked of your deeds!’