d the career of Bolingbroke can believe it possible that he
ever could have felt any sincere admiration for virtue in man or woman,
or could have thought of it otherwise than as a thing to be sneered at
and despised. The literary men, and more especially the poets of the
days of Bolingbroke, seem to have had as little scruple in their
compliments as a French _petit-maitre_ might have in sounding the
praises of his mistress to his mistress's ears. Pope talks of his
villa, where, "nobly {29} pensive, St. John sat and thought," and
declared that such only might

Tread this sacred floor
Who dare to love their country and be poor.

[Sidenote: 1714--Pope's praises]

It is hard to think of Bolingbroke, even in his more advanced years, as
"nobly pensive," sitting and thinking, and certainly neither
Bolingbroke nor any of Bolingbroke's closer political associates was
exactly the sort of man who would have dared "to love his country and
be poor." In Bolingbroke's latest years we hear of him as amusing
himself by boasting to his second wife of his various successful
amours, until at last the lady, weary of the repetition, somewhat
contemptuously reminds him that however happy as a lover he may have
been once, his days of love were now over, and the less he said about
it the better.

Nor was Pope less extravagant in his praise to Harley than to St. John.
He says:

If aught below the seats divine
Can touch immortals, 'tis a soul like thine;
A soul supreme, in each hard instance tried,
Above all pain, all passion, and all pride,
The rage of power, the blast of public breath,
The lust of lucre, and the dread of death.

These lines, it is right to remember, were addressed to Harley, not in
his power, but after his fall. Even with that excuse for a friend's
overcharged eulogy, they read like a satire on Harley rather than like
his panegyric. Caricature itself could not more broadly distort the
features of a human being than his poetic admirer has altered the
lineaments of Oxford. Harley had been intriguing on both sides of the
field. He professed devoted loyalty to the Queen and to her appointed
successor, and he was at the same time coquetting, to put it mildly,
with the Stuart family in France. Nothing surprises a reader more than
the universal duplicity that seems to have prevailed in the days of
Anne and of the early Georges. Falsehood appears to have been a
recognized diplomatic {30} and