kerville. He had entered on his
career, more than twenty years before, with the fairest hopes, young,
noble, nobly allied, of distinguished abilities, of graceful manners.
There was no more brilliant man of fashion in the theatre and in the
ring. There was no more popular tribune in Guildhall. Such was the
commencement of a life so miserable that all the indignation excited by
great faults is overpowered by pity. A guilty passion, amounting to a
madness, left on the moral character of the unhappy man a stain at which
even libertines looked grave. He tried to make the errors of his private
life forgotten by splendid and perilous services to a public cause; and,
having endured in that cause penury and exile, the gloom of a dungeon,
the prospect of a scaffold, the ruin of a noble estate, he was so
unfortunate as to be regarded by the party for which he had sacrificed
every thing as a coward, if not a traitor. Yet, even against such
accumulated disasters and disgraces, his vigorous and aspiring mind
bore up. His parts and eloquence gained for him the ear of the House
of Lords; and at length, though not till his constitution was so broken
that he was fitter for flannel and cushions than for a laborious office
at Whitehall, he was put at the head of one of the most important
departments of the administration. It might have been expected that this
appointment would call forth clamours from widely different quarters;
that the Tories would be offended by the elevation of a rebel; that
the Whigs would set up a cry against the captain to whose treachery
or faintheartedness they had been in the habit of imputing the rout of
Sedgemoor; and that the whole of that great body of Englishmen which
cannot be said to be steadily Whig or Tory, but which is zealous for
decency and the domestic virtues, would see with indignation a
signal mark of royal favour bestowed on one who had been convicted of
debauching a noble damsel, the sister of his own wife. But so capricious
is public feeling that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to find,
in any of the letters, essays, dialogues, and poems which bear the date
of 1699 or of 1700, a single allusion to the vices or misfortunes of the
new First Lord of the Treasury. It is probable that his infirm health
and his isolated position were his protection. The chiefs of the
opposition did not fear him enough to hate him. The Whig junto was still
their terror and their abhorrence. They continued to as