The reputation of Bolingbroke as a political philosopher is something that our age can hardly understand. "A solemn trifler," Lord Morley has called him; and it is difficult to know why his easy declamation was so long mistaken for profound thought. Much, doubtless, is due to that personal fascination which made him the inspiration of men so different as Pope and Voltaire; and the man who could supply ideas to Chatham and Disraeli cannot be wholly devoid of merit. Certainly he wrote well, in that easy elegance of style which was the delight of the eighteenth century; and he is consistently happy in his choice of adjectives. But his work is at every point embellished with that affectation of classical learning which was the curse of his age. He sought no general truths, and he is free from the accusation of sincerity. Nor has he any enthusiasm save that of bitter partisanship. He hated Walpole, and his political writings are, at bottom, no more than an attempt to generalize his animosity. The _Dissertation on Parties_ (1734) and the _Idea of a Patriot King_ (1738) might have betrayed us, taken alone, into regarding their author as a disinterested observer watching with regret the development of a fatal system; but taken in conjunction with the _Letter to Sir W. Windham_ (1717), which was not published until after his death, and is written with an acrid cynicism fatal to his claim to honesty, they reveal the opinions as no more than a mask for ambition born of hate. The whole, of course, must have some sort of background; and the _Letters on the Study of History_ (1735) was doubtless intended to supply it. Experience is to be the test of truth, since history is philosophy teaching by example. But Bolingbroke's own argument supplies its refutation. His history is an arbitrary selection of instances intended to illustrate the particular ideas which happened to be uppermost in his mind. The Roman consuls were chosen by annual election; whence it is clear that England should have, if not an annual, at least a triennial parliament. He acknowledges that the past in some degree unknown determines the present. He has some not unhappy remarks upon the evils of an attitude which fails to look upon events from a larger aspect than their immediate environment. But his history is intended less to illustrate the working of principle than to collect cases worthy of citation. Time and space do not exist as categories; he is as content with a Roman anecdote as with a Stuart illustration. He is willing, indeed, to look for the causes of the Revolution as far back as the reign of James I; though he shows his lack of true perception when he ascribes the true inwardness of the Reformation to the greed of the monarch for the spoils of the clergy. At bottom what mainly impresses him is the immense influence of personal accident upon events. Intrigue, a sudden dislike, some backstairs piece of gossip, here is the real root of great changes.