The Bishop, who proved to all his wives an excellent husband, left to this, his last and his best, the disposal of her own fortune, and the entire charge of his numerous family. Mrs. Burnet, it is evident from many passages in the Duke of Marlborough’s letters, was not only the intimate associate and correspondent of the Duchess, but the object of respect and esteem to all the great leaders of the Whig ministry. She gained that ascendency, doubtless, in a great measure by her moderation—a quality which proves to the actors in difficult times as beneficial as the mariner’s compass to a vessel at sea. It was a quality in which her eminent husband was peculiarly deficient, and the want of which obscured those great and good qualities, and that real regard for truth, for which his contemporaries did not give him justice, and which posterity has slowly and, as it were, reluctantly assigned to him. Mrs. Burnet, unhappily for those whom she instructed by her example, or guided by her influence, was, at this time, no more. The winter of 1708 had witnessed her death, from a pleuritic fever attending the breaking up of the frost in January. With consistent attention to all her engagements, she was buried at Spetchley, by the side of her first husband, in compliance with a promise made to him. And on this delicate point she thought it proper to leave an explanation in her will, for the consolation of her second helpmate, Dr. Burnet.[167] The afflicted and then aged prelate did not survive his wife more than six years; and the close of his eventful and laborious life was saddened by seeing those principles which he had consistently contemned, triumph, and produce renewed confusion and contention. Dr. Burnet was, however, unhappily for his party, but little qualified to advance its popularity by his courtesy, or to gain proselytes by any other measures than an earnest, sincere preference of certain principles. His conversation was singularly deficient in the arts of address; his sincerity was involuntary, and in certain situations provokingly obtrusive. His love of politics, in which he took perhaps too great a share for one engaged in concerns of far higher importance, was derived, according to his own account, from the conversation of his father, who had the same fondness for politics as the excellent prelate himself, and whose arguments and anecdotes engendered that taste in the mind of his son.[168] Hence sprang up that ardent, active, and unquiet character, adapted to do some good, but to incur much censure, in such times as those in which the Bishop lived. The character of Burnet, written by the Marquis of Halifax, and given by that nobleman himself to the Bishop, portrays with much delicacy of touch, and probably in not too severe a light, both the brilliant parts and the strong shadows of Burnet’s mind: it brings to view the singleness of heart, the impetuosity of temper, the quickness