ond was almost the weakest but at the same time the best-bred, and
most popular man in this kingdom. His education in courts and camps,
joined to an easy, gentle nature, had given him that habitual affability,
those engaging manners, and those mechanical attentions, that almost
supplied the place of every talent he wanted; and he wanted almost every
one. They procured him the love of all men, without the esteem of any. He
was impeached after the death of Queen Anne, only because that, having
been engaged in the same measures with those who were necessarily to be
impeached, his impeachment, for form's sake, became necessary. But he was
impeached without acrimony, and without the lest intention that he should
suffer, notwithstanding the party violence of those times. The question
for his impeachment, in the House of Commons, was carried by many fewer
votes than any other question of impeachment; and Earl Stanhope, then Mr.
Stanhope, and Secretary' of State, who impeached him, very soon after
negotiated and concluded his accommodation with the late King; to whom he
was to have been presented the next day. But the late Bishop of
Rochester, Atterbury, who thought that the Jacobite cause might suffer by
losing the Duke of Ormond, went in all haste, and prevailed with the poor
weak man to run away; assuring him that he was only to be gulled into a
disgraceful submission, and not to be pardoned in consequence of it. When
his subsequent attainder passed, it excited mobs and disturbances in
town. He had not a personal enemy in the world; and had a thousand
friends. All this was simply owing to his natural desire of pleasing, and
to the mechanical means that his education, not his parts, had given him
of doing it. The other instance is the late Duke of Marlborough, who
studied the art of pleasing, because he well knew the importance of it:
he enjoyed and used it more than ever man did. He gained whoever he had a
mind to gain; and he had a mind to gain everybody, because he knew that
everybody was more or less worth gaining. Though his power, as Minister
and General, made him many political and party enemies, they did not make
him one personal one; and the very people who would gladly have
displaced, disgraced, and perhaps attainted the Duke of Marlborough, at
the same time personally loved Mr. Churchill, even though his private
character was blemished by sordid avarice, the most unamiable of all
vices. He had wound up and turned his