all I have there to sale, make the most of it, content myself with that, whatever it be, and return free from cares of all kinds to my foreign hermitage?" This, it must be admitted, is not the language of a man whose movements were governed by a knowledge, that the minister and the attorney-general had the power to molest him if he returned to England, or à fortiori before he left that country. In confirmation also of this view of ours we find that he actually revisited his native land, as he had promised to do, and for the purpose which he indicates in the letter above quoted. Dawley brought him twenty-six thousand pounds; a sum it has been alleged more than sufficient to release him from his difficulties.

Bolingbroke's feelings and opinions as well as his character, during his second exile, are delineated in his letters to Sir William Wyndham, published in Coxe's Appendix to the Life of Sir Robert Walpole, and which we have placed at the conclusion of the present memoir.

But he was far from suffering, even in solitude, his hours to glide away in torpid inactivity. That active restless disposition still continued to actuate his pursuits; and having lost the season for gaining power over his contemporaries, he was now resolved upon acquiring fame from posterity. He had not been long in his retreat at Chanteloup, when he began a course of letters on the study and use of history, for the use of a young nobleman, (Lord Cornbury.) In these he does not follow the methods of St. Real and others who have treated on this subject, and who make history the great fountain of all knowledge; he very wisely confines its benefits, and supposes them to consist in deducing general maxims from particular facts, more than in illustrating maxims by the application of historical passages. In mentioning ecclesiastical history, he gives his opinion very freely upon the subject of the divine original of the sacred books, which he supposes to have no such foundation. This new system of thinking, which he had always propagated in conversation, and which he now began to adopt in his more labored compositions, seemed no way supported either by his acuteness or his learning. He began to reflect seriously on these subjects too late in life, and to suppose those objections very new and unanswerable, which had been already confuted by thousands. "Lord Bolingbroke," says Pope, in one of his letters, "is above trifling; when he writes of any thing in this world, he is more than mortal. If ever he trifles, it must be when he turns divine." Very appropriate, also, is the remark in reference to this very work, in the "Memoirs of the Life and Ministerial Conduct, &c., of Lord Viscount Bolingbroke," viz: "I should be sorry that you took your politics from priests; but I should be in more pain if I thought you in

VOL. I.-F

any danger of receiving your religion from a politician." Bolingbroke was not calculated by education, conduct, prior reading or study, and frame of mind, for treating so important a subject as the origin of the sacred writings. How greatly it is to be regretted that, in place of this immature and discreditable production, he did not give the world his projected history of Europe, from the year 1659, that of the peace of the Pyrenees, to 1713, that of the peace of Utrecht.

In the mean time, as it was evident, that a man of his active ambition, in choosing retirement when no longer able to lead in public, must be liable to ridicule in assuming a resigned philosophical air, he, in order to obviate this censure, addressed a letter to Lord Bathurst, upon the true use of retirement and study; in which he shows himself still able and willing to undertake the cause of his country, whenever its distresses should require his exertion. "I have," he says, "renounced neither my country, nor my friends; and by friends, I mean all those, and those alone, who are such to their country. In their prosperity, they shall never hear of me; in their distress, always. In that retreat wherein the remainder of my days shall be spent, I may be of some use to them, since even from thence I may advise, exhort, and warn them." Bent upon this pursuit only, and having now exchanged the gay statesman for the grave philosopher, he shone forth with distinguished lustre. His conversation took a different turn from what had been usual with him, and, as we are assured by Lord Orrery, who knew him, it united the wisdom of Socrates, the dignity and ease of Pliny, and the wit of Horace.

His mode of life in France, at this time, is described by Pope to be "divided between study and exercise; for he still reads or writes five or six hours a day, and hunts generally twice a week. He has the whole forest of Fontainebleau at his command, with the king's stables and dogs." "I never saw him in stronger health, or in better humor with his friends, or more indifferent and dispassionate as to his enemies." He had built a pavilion in a garden belonging to the abbey of Sêns, which retreat he represents in one of his letters to be the scene of all his literary labors at this time.

But it was Bolingbroke's fate never to pass a long period in the same kind of pursuit, nor to present himself long in the same guise before the world. By the death, in 1742, of his father, he Viscount St. John, at the advanced age of ninety, he was placed in possession of the family estate, which he was empowered by act of parliament to inherit. This event necessarily occasioned his return to England, and gave him such an accession of fortune as to enable him to remain, and to live in a manner conformable with his wishes and tastes. In the same year in which

Bolingbroke returned to England, Walpole ceased to be prime minister. We have already intimated the probable share which the former had in the downfall of his rival, and need not recur to the subject. But, although his revenge may have been gratified by this occurrence, he gained little personally. Time was hardly allowed to ascertain how far he would have been willing to accept, or his old associates in the opposition who were become the dominant party, to offer office to him, or additional title, before they lost their own popularity and influence by a mixed display of selfishness and timidity. Walpole was dead, and Pulteney soon became politically so, by allowing himself to be removed from the House of Commons to that of the Peers, with the title of the Earl of Bath. Of him Walpole used to say, that he feared his tongue more than another man's sword. But far different were the emotions of the ex-minister, now Earl of Oxford, when he first met his once formidable rival in the upper house; and truly might he say, as far as Pulteney was concerned: "My Lord of Bath, you and I are now the two most insignificant men in the kingdom." It was in reference to Pulteney, who, at the instance of Walpole was compelled to take out a patent for the earldom, which had been promised him at the formation of the new ministry, that the latter used the expression, of his having turned the key upon his rival; intimating thereby, that the door of the cabinet was never to be unlatched for him. The result verified the prediction, or rather was in harmony with the intention.

Bolingbroke now in possession of the old family seat at Battersea, resolved, according to some accounts of his life, to spend the remainder of his days in philosophical retirement. But, however sincere he may have been in such often announced resolutions, he had not yet reached the time when he could abstain from manifesting a lively interest, and taking, moreover, an active part in public questions, and political intrigues connected with them. In the summer of 1743 we find him writing from France, a visit to which country was said to be connected with some pecuniary difficulties at home. Pope seems ever to have had a poor opinion of the domestic economy and management of his noble friend, who, the poet said, would never be worth three thousand pounds.

In the letters from Argeville, the politician and the agriculturist, says Mr. Cooke, are strangely mingled. The notice of the battle of Dettingen, and some dark observations upon a political intrigue which we are now unable to explain, are directly succeeded by an earnest request for a consignment of a quantity of acorns, and for the necessary instructions as to their culture. The evacuation of Germany, and the designs of the Queen of Hungary, are discussed in almost the same sentence with the excellences of the red Virginia oak. After a visit to Aix la

Chapelle, for the relief of the rheumatism, he returned to England. In the summer of the following year he again visited France, where he had still kept up an establishment. This was now broken up, and he took a final leave of the country in which so large a portion of his life had been spent.

His first production after his settlement at Battersea, written with political views and for political effect, was the "Idea of a Patriot King." It was composed ostensibly for the instruction of Frederick, Prince of Wales, heir apparent of George II, but who was fated never to reach the throne. It is not probable that, if he had lived, he would have conferred either credit upon his political teacher, or lustre on his reign. He was weak, vicious and false. According to Lord Brougham, (Edin. Rev.), Bolingbroke's "Idea of a Patriot King," certainly differed from his idea of a patriot subject. The duty of the former, according to the author, required a constant sacrifice of his own interests to the good of his country, the duty of the latter he considered to be a constant sacrifice of his country to himself. The one was bound on no account ever to regard either his feelings or his tastes, the interests of his family or the powers of his station; the other was justified in regarding his own gratification, whether of caprice or revenge, or ambition, as the only object of his life. Between the ruler and his subjects there was in this view no kind of reciprocity; for all the life of real sacrifice spent by the one was to be repaid by a life of undisturbed and undisguised self-seeking in the other." The remainder of the critique is in the same spirit.

It would appear, from the biographers of Bolingbroke, as if after the year 1744, when he quitted France for ever, that he really practised the secluded life which he had so often affected. His advanced age, and increasing infirmities, his disappointment at the turn of his own fortunes, and loss of confidence in the integrity, if he ever gave them credit for it, and at any rate in the ability of his political associates and coadjutors, to purify the corruption in government, and renovate the decayed state, might all be supposed adequate causes for his seclusion and determined abstinence from interfering any more in public life. But from the temperament of the man, and the very constitution of his mind, he was ever impelled to continue his former courses as a political manager-advising and exhorting where he could no longer lead, and aiding to pull down, though without the power of rebuilding after his own fashion, and according to his own views and theory. He was still, as is shown by the Marchmont Papers, "busy and deep in all the intrigues of that most intriguing period," the six or seven years preceding his death. On the 6th of November, 1744, we find him "conferring with Mr. Pitt for maintaining and extending a coalition of parties, and stating

to Lord Marchmont, that he found Mr. Pitt so haughty and impracticable that he was obliged to remind him, that as to the existing coalition, neither Lord Chesterfield nor Mr. Pitt had formed it, but he (Bolingbroke) himself.""-Marchmont Papers, I, 72. Nor was it in domestic intrigues alone that he busied himself. "Dec. 25th, 1744-Lord Bolingbroke told me (Marchmont) that Lord Chesterfield had been with him this morning, and had talked to him of our situation as to foreign affairs, and that he wanted to see me about them."—Ibid. 93.

"Again, in February, 1746, (and indeed passim,) we find Bolingbroke very busy about the short-lived Barteret ministry, (Ibid. 173,) and we have in the same work an important letter from him so late as July, 1746,—(to a passage of which we have already referred for another purpose)-in which he says: I did not leave England in 1735, till some schemes, which were then in the loom-though they never came to effect-made me one too many even to my most intimate friends; and I have not left off, since I came to resettle here, advising and extending, till long after you saw it was to no purpose.""-Marchmont Papers, II, 356.

"And though of course a man of seventy would every year rapidly lose some of his vivacity and eagerness in public affairs, we have letters of his down to the eve of his decease, which prove that he still took a lively interest in the business of the political world."—Quart. Rev., No. cviii.

The peace of Aix la Chapelle, in 1748, was made an occasion. by Bolingbroke for his resuming his pen, and giving to the public, in the following year, his last work, "Some Reflections upon the Present State of the Nation, principally with regard to her Taxes and her Debts, and on the Causes and Consequences of them." The subject so ably discussed in this treatise has lost none of its interest since that time, indeed must be regarded as of increased importance, even though we might not estimate it in the ratio of the increase of the main topic-the national debt. The language which the author held at that time was certainly not prophetic, although both the political economist and the patriot may wish that the warning it conveyed had been since attended to; as where he says: "Nothing but the speedy diminution of our national debts, can secure us effectually against contingent effects, that may be of fatal consequence. Upon this the future prosperity and safety of this country depend." This work, however, was never finished. Its completion, at first interrupted by the death of Lady Bolingbroke, was prevented subsequently by the increasing infirmities, and the painful malady which terminated the life of the author himself.

In February, 1750, Bolingbroke writes from London, to his