greedy of French gold; he had by no means relinquished the hope that he might, at some future day, be able to establish absolute monarchy by the help of the French arms; and for both reasons he wished to maintain a good understanding with the court at Versailles.

Thus the sovereign leaned toward one system of foreign. politics, and the minister toward a system diametrically op posite. Neither the sovereign nor the minister, indeed, was of a temper to pursue any object with undeviating constancy. Each occasionally yielded to the importunity of the other, and their jarring inclinations and mutual concessions gave to the whole administration a strangely ca pricious character. Charles sometimes, from levity and indolence, suffered Danby to take steps which Louis resented as mortal injuries. Danby, on the other hand, rather than relinquish his great place, sometimes stooped to compli ances which caused him bitter pain and shame. The King was brought to consent to a marriage between the Lady Mary, eldest daughter and presumptive heiress of the Duke of York, and William of Orange, the deadly enemy of France, and the hereditary champion of the Reformation; nay, the brave Earl of Ossory, son of Ormond, was sent to assist the Dutch with some British troops, who, on the most bloody day of the whole war, signally vindicated the national reputation for stubborn courage. The treasurer, on the other hand, was induced, not only to connive at some scandalous pecuniary transactions which took place between his master and the court of Versailles, but to become unwillingly, indeed, and ungraciously-an agent in those transactions.

SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE.

Of all the official men of that age, Temple had preserved the fairest character. The Triple Alliance had been his work. He had refused to take any part in the politics of the Cabal, and had, while that administration directed affairs, lived in strict privacy. He had quitted his retreat at the call of Danby, and made peace between England and Holland, and had borne a chief part in bringing about the marriage of the Lady Mary to her cousin the Prince of

Orange. Thus he had the credit of every one of the few good things which had been done by the government since the Restoration. Of the numerous crimes and blunders of the last eighteen years, none could be imputed to him. His private life, though not austere, was decorous; his manners were popular; and he was not to be corrupted either by titles or by money. Something, however, was wanting to the character of this respectable statesman. The temperature of his patriotism was lukewarm. prized his ease and his personal dignity too much, and shrank from responsibility with a pusillanimous fear. Nor, indeed, had his habits fitted him to bear a part in the conflicts of our domestic factions. He had reached his fiftieth year without having sat in the English Parliament; and his official experience had been almost entirely acquired at for eign courts. He was justly esteemed one of the first diplo matists in Europe; but the talents and accomplishments of a diplomatist are widely different from those which qualify a politician to lead the House of Commons in agitated times.

GEORGE SAVILE, VISCOUNT HALIFAX.

AMONG the statesmen of that age, Halifax was, in genius, the first. His intellect was fertile, subtle, and capacious. His polished, luminous, and animated eloquence, set off by the silver tones of his voice, was the delight of the House of Lords. His conversation overflowed with thought, fancy, and wit. His political tracts well deserve to be studied for their literary merit, and fully entitle him to a place among English classics. To the weight derived from talents so great and various, he united all the influence which belongs to rank and ample possessions. Yet he was less successful in politics than many who enjoyed smaller advantages. Indeed, those intellectual peculiarities which make his writings valuable, frequently impeded him in the contests of active life; for he always saw passing events, not in the point of view in which they commonly appear to one who bears a part in them, but in the point of view in which, after the lapse of many years, they appear to the philosophic his torian. With such a turn of mind he could not long con

tinue to act cordially with any body of men. All the prejudices, all the exaggerations of both the great parties in the state, moved his scorn. He despised the mean arts and unreasonable clamors of demagogues. He despised still more the Tory doctrines of divine right and passive obedience. He sneered impartially at the bigotry of the Churchman and at the bigotry of the Puritan. He was equally unable to comprehend how any man should object to saints' days and surplices, and how any man should persecute any other man for objecting to them. In temper he was what, in our time, is called a Conservative. In theory he was a Republican. Even when his dread of anarchy and his disdain for vulgar delusions led him to side for a time with the defenders of arbitrary power, his intellect was always with Locke and Milton. Indeed, his jests upon hereditary monarchy were sometimes such as would have better become a member of the Calf's Head Club than a privy councillor of the Stuarts. In religion he was so far from being a zealot, that he was called by the uncharitable an atheist; but this imputation he vehemently repelled; and in truth, though he sometimes gave scandal by the way in which he exerted his rare powers both of argumentation and of ridicule on serious subjects, he seems to have been by no means unsusceptible of religious impressions.

He was the chief of those politicians whom the two great parties contemptuously called Trimmers. Instead of quarrelling with this nickname, he assumed it as a title of honor, and vindicated with great vivacity, the dignity of the appellation. Everything good, he said, trims between extremes. The temperate zone trims between the climate in which men are roasted and the climate in which they are frozen. The English Church trims between the Anabaptist madness and the papist lethargy. The English constitution trims between Turkish despotism and Polish anarchy. Virtue is nothing but a just temper between propensities, any one of which, if indulged to excess, becomes vice; nay, the perfection of the Supreme Being himself consists in the exact equilibrium of attributes, none of which could preponderate without disturbing the whole moral and physical order of the world. Thus Halifax was a trimmer on principle. He was also a trimmer by the constitution both of his head and

It will be seen that I believe Halifax to have been the author, or at least one of the authors, of the "Character of a Trimmer," which, for a time, went under the name of his kinsman, Sir William Coventry.

of his heart. His understanding was keen, skeptical, inexhaustibly fertile in distinctions and objections; his taste refined; his sense of the ludicrous exquisite; his temper placid and forgiving, but fastidious, and by no means prone either to malevolence or to enthusiastic admiration. Such a man could not long be constant to any band of political allies. He must not, however, be confounded with the vulgar crowd of renegades; for though, like them, he passed from side to side, his transition was always in the direction opposite to theirs. He had nothing in common with those who fly from extreme to extreme, and who regard the party which they have deserted with an animosity far exceeding that of consistent enemies. His place was between the hostile divisions of the community, and he never wandered far beyond the frontier of either. The party to which he at any moment belonged, was the party which, at that moment, he liked best, because it was the party of which, at the moment, he had the nearest view. He was, therefore, always severe upon his violent associates, and was always in friendly relations with his moderate opponents. Every faction, in the day of its insolent and vindictive triumph, incurred his censure, and every faction, when vanquished and persecuted, found in him a protector. To his lasting honor it must be mentioned, that he attempted to save those victims whose fate has left the deepest stain both on the Whig and on the Tory name.

He had greatly distinguished himself in opposition, and had thus drawn on himself the royal displeasure, which was indeed so strong that he was not admitted into the council of the thirty without much difficulty, and long altercation. As soon, however, as he had obtained a footing at court, the charms of his manner and of his conversation made him a favorite. He was seriously alarmed by the violence of the public discontent. He thought that liberty was for the present safe, and that order and legitimate authority were in danger. He therefore, as was his fashion, joined himself to the weaker side. Perhaps his conversion was not wholly disinterested; for study and reflection, though they had emancipated him from many vulgar prejudices, had left him a slave to vulgar desires. Money he did not want, and there is no evidence that he ever obtained it by any means which, in that age, even severe censors considered as dishonorable; but rank and power had strong attractions for him. He pretended, indeed, that he considered titles and great offices as baits which could allure none but fools, that

he hated business pomp, and pageantry, and that his dearest wish was to escape from the bustle and glitter of Whitehall to the quiet woods which surrounded his ancient hall at Rufford; but his conduct was not a little at variance with his professions. In truth, he wished to command the respect at once of courtiers and of philosophers, to be admired for attaining high dignities, and to be at the same time admired for despising them.

ROBERT SPENCER, EARL OF SUNDERLAND.

SUNDERLAND Was Secretary of State. In this man tho political immorality of his age was personified in the most lively manner. Nature had given him a keen understanding, a restless and mischievous temper, a cold heart, and an abject spirit. His mind had undergone a training by which all his vices had been nursed up to the rankest maturity. At his entrance into public life, he had passed several years in diplomatic posts abroad, and had been, during some time, minister in France. Every calling has its peculiar temptations. There is no injustice in saying that diplomatists, as a class, have always been more distinguished by their address, by the art with which they win the confidence of those with whom they have to deal, and by the ease with which they catch the tone of every society into which they are admitted, than by generous enthusiasm or austere rectitude; and the relations between Charles and Louis were such that no English nobleman could long reside in France as envoy, and retain any patriotic or honorable sentiment. Sunderland came forth from the bad school in which he had been brought up, cunning, supple, shameless, free from all prejudices, and destitute of all principles. He was, by hereditary connection, a Cavalier, but with the Cavaliers he had nothing in common. They were zealous for monarchy, and condemned in theory all resistance; yet they had sturdy English hearts, which would never have endured real despotism. He, on the contrary, had a languid, speculative liking for Republican institutions, which was compatible with perfect readiness to be in practice the most servile instrument of arbitrary power. Like many other accomplished flatterers