a boy to resist the arts of a noble, eloquent, and wealthy flatterer who united juvenile vivacity to profound art and long experience of the gay world. It mattered not what the novice preferied, gallantry or field sports, the dice-box or the bottle. Wharton soon found out the master passion, offered sympathy, advice, and assistance, and, while seeming to be only the minister of his disciple's pleasures, made sure of his disciple's vote.

The party to whose interests Wharton, with such spirit and constancy, devoted his time, his fortune, his talents, his very vices, judged him, as was natural, far too leniently. He was widely known by the very undeserved appellation of Honest Tom. Some pious men, Burnet for example, and Addison, averted their eyes from the scandal which he gave, and spoke of him, not indeed with esteem, yet with goodwill. A most ingenious and accomplished Whig, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, author of the Characteristics, described Wharton as the most mysterious of human beings, as a strange compound of best and worst, of private depravity and public virtue, and owned himself unable to understand how a man utterly without principle in everything but politics should in politics be as true as steel. But that which, in the judgment of one faction, more than half redeemed all Wharton's faults, seemed to the other faction to aggravate them all. The opinion which the Tories entertained of him is expressed in a single line written after his death by the ablest man of that party, Jonathan Swift: "He was the most universal villain that ever I knew." Wharton's political adversaries thirsted for his blood, and repeatedly tried to shed it. Had he not been a man of imperturbable temper, dauntless courage, and consummate skill in fence, his life would have been a short one. But neither anger nor danger ever deprived him of his presence of mind: he was an incomparable swordsman; and he had a peculiar way of disarming opponents which moved the envy of all the duellists of his time. His friends said that he had never given a challenge, that he had never refused one, that he had never taken a life, and yet that he had never fought without having his antagonist's life at his mercy.

The four men who have been described resembled each other so little that it may be thought strange that they should ever have been able to act in concert.

They did, however, act

in the closest concert during many years. They more than once rose and more than once fell together. But their union lasted till it was dissolved by death. Little as some of them may have deserved esteem, none of them can be accused of having been false to his brethren of the Junto.

SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE. 1628-1699.
(Essay on Sir William Temple.)

TEMPLE is one of those men whom the world has agreed to praise highly without knowing much about them, and who are therefore more likely to lose than to gain by a close examination. Yet he is not without fair pretensions to the most honourable place among the statesmen of his time. A few of them equalled or surpassed him in talents; but they were men of no good repute for honesty. A few may be named whose patriotism was purer, nobler, and more disinterested than his; but they were men of no eminent ability. Morally, he was above Shaftesbury; intellectually, he was above Russell.

To say of a man that he occupied a high position in times of misgovernment, of corruption, of civil and religious faction, that nevertheless he contracted no great stain and bore no part in any great crime, that he won the esteem of a profligate Court and of a turbulent people, without being guilty of any disgraceful subserviency to either, seems to be very high praise; and all this may with truth be said of Temple.

Yet Temple is not a man to our taste. A temper not naturally good, but under strict command; a constant regard to decorum ; a rare caution in playing that mixed game of skill and hazard, human life; a disposition to be content with small and certain winnings rather than to go on doubling the stake; these seem to us to be the most remarkable features of his character. This sort of moderation, when united, as in him it

was, with very considerable abilities, is, under ordinary circum stances, scarcely to be distinguished from the highest and purest integrity, and yet may be perfectly compatible with laxity of principle, with coldness of heart, and with the most intense selfishness. Temple, we fear, had not sufficient warmth and elevation of sentiment to deserve the name of a virtuous man. He did not betray or oppress his country: nay, he rendered considerable services to her; but he risked nothing for her. No temptation which either the King or the Opposition could nold out ever induced him to come forward as the supporter either of arbitrary or of factious measures. But he was most care. ful not to give offence by strenuously opposing such measures. He never put himself prominently before the public eye, except at conjunctures when he was almost certain to gain, and could not possibly lose, at conjunctures when the interest of the State, the views of the Court, and the passions of the multitude, all appeared for an instant to coincide. By judiciously availing himself of several of these rare moments, he succeeded in establishing a high character for wisdom and patriotism. When the favourable crisis was passed, he never risked the reputation which he had won. He avoided the great offices of State with a caution almost pusillanimous, and confined himself to quiet and secluded departments of public business, in which he could enjoy moderate but certain advantages without incurring envy. If the circumstances of the country became such that it was impossible to take any part in politics without some danger, he retired to his library and his orchard, and, while the nation groaned under oppression, or resounded with tumult and with the din of civil arms, amused himself by writing memoirs and tying up apricots. His political career bore some resemblance to the military career of Louis the Fourteenth. Louis, lest his royal dignity should be compromised by failure, never repaired to a siege till it had been reported to him by the most skilful officers in his service, that nothing could prevent the fall of the place. When this was ascertained, the monarch, in his helmet and cuirass, appeared among the tents, held councils of war, dictated the capitulation, received the keys, and then returned

to Versailles to hear his flatterers repeat that Turenne had been beaten at Mariendal, that Condé had been forced to raise the siege of Arras, and that the only warrior whose glory had never been obscured by a single check was Louis the Great. Yet Condé and Turenne will always be considered as captains of a very different order from the invincible Louis; and we must own that many statesmen who have committed great faults, appear to us to be deserving of more esteem than the faultless Temple. For in truth his faultlessness is chiefly to be ascribed to his extreme dread of all responsibility, to his determination rather to leave his country in a scrape than to run any chance of being in a scrape himself. He seems to have been averse from danger; and it must be admitted that the dangers to which a public man was exposed, in those days of conflicting tyranny and sedition, were of the most serious kind. He could not bear discomfort, bodily or mental. His lamentations when, in the course of his diplomatic journies, he was put a little out of his way, and forced, in the vulgar phrase, to rough it, are quite amusing. He talks of riding a day or two on a bad Westphalian road, of sleeping on straw for one night, of travelling in winter when the snow lay on the ground, as if he had gone on an expedition to the North Pole or to the source of the Nile. This kind of valetudinarian effeminacy, this habit of coddling himself, appears in all parts of his conduct. He loved fame, but not with the love of an exalted and generous mind. He loved it as an end, not at all as a means; as a personal luxury, not at all as an instrument of advantage to others. He scraped it together and treasured it up with a timid and niggardly thrift; and never employed the hoard in any enterprise, however virtuous and useful, in which there was hazard of losing one particle. No wonder if such a person did little or nothing which deserves positive blame. But much more than this may justly be demanded of a man possessed of such abilities, and placed in such a situation.

Of course a man is not bound to be a politician any more than he is bound to be a soldier; and there are perfectly honourable ways of quitting both politics and the military

profession. But neither in the one way of life, nor in the other,
is any man entitled to take all the sweet and leave all the sour.
A man who belongs to the army only in time of peace, who
appears at reviews in Hyde Park, escorts the Sovereign with
the utmost valour and fidelity to and from the House of Lords,
and retires as soon as he thinks it likely that he may be ordered
on an expedition, is justly thought to have disgraced himself.
Some portion of the censure due to such a holiday-soldier
may justly fall on the mere holiday-politician, who flinches from
his duties as soon as those duties become difficult and dis-
agreeable, that is to say, as soon as it becomes peculiarly
important that he should resolutely perform them.

LORD CHATHAM'S ELOQUENCE. 1736.

(The First Essay on Lord Chatham.)

7

THE address which the House of Commons presented to the
King on occasion of the Prince's marriage was moved, not by
the Minister, but by Pulteney, the leader of the Whigs in
opposition. It was on this motion that Pitt, who had not
broken silence during the session in which he took his seat,
addressed the House for the first time. "A contemporary
historian," says Mr. Thackeray, "describes Mr. Pitt's first
speech as superior even to the models of ancient eloquence.
According to Tindal, it was more ornamented than the speeches
of Demosthenes, and less diffuse than those of Cicero." This
unmeaning phrase has been a hundred times quoted. That it
should ever have been quoted, except to be laughed at, is
strange. The vogue which it has obtained may serve to show
in how slovenly a way most people are content to think.
Tindal, who first used it, or Archdeacon Coxe and Mr. Thackeray,
who have borrowed it, ever in their lives hear any speaking

Did

'The Prince, whose marriage was in question, was Frederick, the father of George the Third. He died in 1751. The Rev. Francis Thackeray was the author of the Life of Chatham on which Macaulay's review was written.