f Ireland; in which
Walpole acknowledges that he was the most popular governor which that
luckless country ever had. "Nothing was cried up but his integrity. He
would have laughed at any man who had any confidence in his morality."

But Chesterfield's vice-royalty deserves better treatment than this. In
Ireland he _was_ an able governor. The man had something to do, and he
did it. The lounger of the London clubs could not dawdle through the
day in the midst of a fiery people full of faction, bleeding with the
wounds of civil war, and indignant at the supremacy of the "Saxon."

Jacobitism, in England a fashion, was in Ireland a fury. In England a
phantom of party, it was in Ireland a fierce superstition. In England a
fading recollection of power lost, and a still feebler hope of favours
to come, it was in Ireland a hereditary frenzy embittered by personal
sufferings, exalted by fantastic notions of pedigree, and sanctioned by
the secret but powerful stimulants of Rome. This was no place for a man
to take his rest, unless he could contrive to sleep on thorns.

Chesterfield was thus forced to be vigorous and vigilant; to watch every
symptom of disaffection, to suppress every incipient turbulence, to
guide without the appearance of control, and to make his popularity the
strength of a government almost wholly destitute of civil reputation or
military force. But the highest panegyric is to be found in the period
of his thus preserving the peace of Ireland. It was in 1745, when the
Pretender was proclaimed in Edinburgh, when the Highland army was on its
march to London, and when all the hopes of hollow courtiership and
inveterate Jacobitism were turned to the triumph of the ancient dynasty.
Yet, Ireland was kept in a state of quietude, and the empire was thus
saved from the greatest peril since the Norman invasion.

An Irish insurrection would have largely multiplied the hazards of the
Brunswick throne; and though we have firm faith in the power of England
to extinguish a foreign invader, yet, when the question came to be
simply one of the right to the crown, and the decision was to be made by
civil conflict, the alienation, or the insurrection, of Ireland might
have thrown an irresistible weight into the scale.

It is not our purpose, nor would it be becoming, to more than allude to
the private life of this showy personage. His was not the era of either
public or private morality. His marriage was contemptible, a connexio