way as great a man as
the Duke of Marlborough. At the time we are now describing he seemed
to have passed through a long, a varied, and a brilliant career, and
yet he had only arrived at the age when public men in England now begin
to be regarded as responsible politicians. He was in his thirty-sixth
year. The career that had prematurely begun was drawing to its
premature close. He had climbed to his highest position; he is
Prime-minister of England, and has managed to get rid of his old
colleague and rival, Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford. Bolingbroke had
almost every gift and grace that nature and fortune could give. Three
years before this Swift wrote to Stella, "I think Mr. St. John the
greatest young man I ever knew; wit, capacity, beauty, quickness of
apprehension, good learning and an excellent taste; the greatest orator
in the House of Commons, admirable conversation, good nature and good
manners, generous, and a despiser of money." Yet, as in the fairy
story, the benign powers which had combined to endow him so richly had
withheld the one gift which might have made all the rest of {27}
surpassing value, and which being denied left them of little account.
If Bolingbroke had had principle he would have been one of the greatest
Englishmen of any time. His utter want of morality in politics, as
well as in private life, proved fatal to him; he only climbed high in
order to fall the lower. He was remarkable for profligacy even in that
heedless and profligate time. Voltaire, in one of his letters, tells a
story of a famous London courtesan who exclaimed to some of her
companion nymphs on hearing that Bolingbroke had been made Secretary of
State, "Seven thousand guineas a year, girls, and all for us!" Even if
the story be not true it is interesting and significant as an evidence
of the sort of impression which Bolingbroke had made upon his age. It
was his glory to be vicious; he was proud of his orgies. He liked to
be known as a man who could spend the whole night in a drunken revel,
and the afternoon in preparing some despatch on which the fortunes of
his country or the peace of the world might depend. The sight of a
beautiful woman could turn him away for the time from the gravest
political purposes. He was ready at such a moment to throw anything
over for the sake of the sudden love-chase which had come in his way.
He bragged of his amours, and boasted that he had never failed of
success with any woman w