e evil, being unreal and antagonistic to
man's nature, is an enemy to be fought against and conquered, Berkeley
takes a lower ground, and is content to show in his reply to Mandeville
that virtue is more profitable to a state than vice. He annihilates many
of Mandeville's arguments in a masterly style, but it was left to the
author of the _Serious Call_ to strike at the root of Mandeville's
fallacy, and to show how the seat of virtue, if I may apply Hooker's
noble words with regard to law, 'is the bosom of God, her voice the
harmony of the world; all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the
very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from
her power.'

[Sidenote: Lord Bolingbroke (1678-1751).]

The life of Henry St. John was a mass of contradictions. He was a
brilliant politician who affected to be a wise statesman, a traitor to
his country while pretending to be a patriot, an orator whose lips
distilled honied phrases which his actions belied, a man of insatiable
ambition who masked as a philosopher, a profligate without shame, a
faithless friend, and an unscrupulous opponent. Blessed with every charm
of manner, features, and voice, with a taste for literature and a large
faculty of acquisition, he was a slave to the meanest vices. A Secretary
of State at thirty-two, no man probably ever entered upon public life
with brighter prospects, and the secret of all his failures was due to
the want of character. 'Few people,' says Lord Hervey, 'ever believed
him without being deceived or trusted him without being betrayed; he was
one to whom prosperity was no advantage, and adversity no instruction.'

It is said that his genius as an orator was of a high order and this we
can believe the more readily since the style of his works is distinctly
oratorical. In speech so much depends upon voice and manner that it is
possible for a shallow thinker to be an extremely attractive speaker;
Bolingbroke's speeches have not been preserved, and we may therefore
continue, if we please, to hold with Pitt, that they are the most
desirable of all the lost fragments of literature; his writings, far
more showy than solid, do not convey a lofty impression of intellectual
power. Obvious truths and well-worn truisms are uttered in high-sounding
words, but in no department of thought can it be said that Bolingbroke
breaks new ground. Much that he wrote was for the day and died with it,
and if his more ambitious efforts, wr