It was not until after Bolingbroke had passed the period of early youth, that this love of display, not to dignify it with the name of ambition, took a higher aim than the desire of being the most lavish, the most fearless, the most eccentric, and the most profane profligate of his age. At Oxford, his powerful comprehension, his ready wit, the subtility of his reasoning, the extent of his memory, raised expectations of his career, which were soon dissipated by his mad and outrageous, rather than sensual course of pleasures. When he moved into the sphere of fashion to which his birth entitled him, it became his degrading boast that his mistress was the most expensive of her class; and that he could drink a greater quantity of wine, without intoxication, than any of his companions. Yet, in the midst of such associates as envied or extolled his supremacy, St. John never wholly lost that desire for better things, that love of knowledge, and value of intellectual excellence, which afterwards raised him from debasement, and which still ennoble his name, in spite of his unprincipled political career, and of the obliquity of his moral conduct. It was not until the latter end of the reign of William, and after his first marriage, that Henry St. John applied himself to politics. He was then twenty-eight years of age. Unhappily for him, he consulted what he deemed expediency (his guide through life) in the first respectable connexion that he formed. He married the daughter and co-heiress of Sir Henry Winchescomb, a descendant from the famous clothier, Jack of Newbury, who entertained Henry the Eighth and his suite. The union which St. John thought proper to form might have been considered prudent by his friends, but it proved adverse to all improvement in his domestic conduct. His wife, though commended for her personal and mental accomplishments, yet failed in fixing the gay, inconstant Bolingbroke. A separation ensued; and though much of the lady’s fortune, which amounted to forty thousand pounds, became the portion of her husband, it was subsequently, with the exception of some estates, given back to her family after his attainder. So far his worldly interests were concerned; but it was Bolingbroke’s fate, in after life, to attach himself strongly to the wife of the Marquis de Villette, the niece of Madam de Maintenon, and to be truly, passionately, and long hopelessly attached. His jealousies, his uncertainties, the sickness of hope deferred, were a retribution to his former indulgence of what are too lightly termed the pleasant vices; in which his vanity, perhaps his passions were concerned, but in which the heart participated not.