Bolingbroke a
service. It was a fault to be forgiven by a friend, but Bolingbroke,
after nursing his anger for five years, gave vent to it in this
contemptible and underhand way. He died two years afterwards, and in
1754 the posthumous publication of Bolingbroke's _Philosophical
Writings_ by Mallet, aroused a storm of indignation in the country,
which his debauchery and political immorality had failed to excite.
Johnson's saying on the occasion is well-known:

'Sir, he was a scoundrel and a coward; a scoundrel for charging a
blunderbuss against religion and morality; a coward because he had not
resolution to fire it off himself, but left half-a-crown to a beggarly
Scotchman to draw the trigger after his death.'

The most noteworthy estimate of Bolingbroke's character made in our day
comes from the pen of Mr. John Morley,[59] who describes as follows his
position as a man of letters. 'He handled the great and difficult
instrument of written language with such freedom and copiousness, such
vivacity and ease, that in spite of much literary foppery and falsetto,
he ranks in all that musicians call execution, only below the three or
four highest masters of English prose. Yet of all the characters in our
history Bolingbroke must be pronounced to be most of a charlatan; of all
the writing in our literature, his is the hollowest, the flashiest, the
most insincere.' This is true. By his 'execution,' consummate though it
be, he is unable to conceal his insincerity and shallowness.
'Bolingbroke,' said Lord Shelburne, was 'all surface,' and in that
sentence his character is written.

'People seem to think,' said Carlyle, 'that a style can be put off or
put on, not like a skin, but like a coat. Is not a skin verily a product
and close kinsfellow of all that lies under it,--exact type of the
nature of the beast, not to be plucked off without flaying and death?'

Two years after the publication of the _Philosophical Writings_, Edmund
Burke, then a young man of twenty-four, published _A Vindication of
Natural Society_, in a _Letter to Lord----. By a late noble writer_, in
which Lord Bolingbroke's style is imitated, and his arguments against
revealed religion applied to exhibit 'the miseries and evils arising to
mankind from every species of Artificial Society.' So close is the
imitation of Bolingbroke's style and mode of argument in this piece of
irony, that it was for a time believed to be a genuine production, and
Mallet found it