Justin McCarthy

“ Some of the projects then put forward, and believed in, surpass in senseless extravagance anything satirized by Ben Jonson. So wild was the passion for new enterprises, that it seemed as if, at one time, anybody had only to announce any scheme, however preposterous, in order to find people competing for shares in it. The only condition of things in our own time that could be compared with this epoch of insane speculation is the railway mania of 1846, when, for a brief season, George Hudson was king, and set up his hat in the market-place, and all England bowed down in homage to it. ”

“ Clubs had been political societies, at both of which Swift was all powerful, but they, too, were no more. The "Kit-Kat" Club, of mystic origin and enigmatic name, with all its loyalty to Hanover and all its memories of bright toasts, of Steele, Addison, and Godfrey Kneller, had passed away in 1709, and met no more in Shire Lane, off Fleet Street, or at the "Upper Flask" Inn at Hampstead. It had not lived in vain, according to Walpole, who declared that its patriots had saved the country. Within its rooms the evil-omened Lord Mohun had broken the gilded emblem of the crown off his chair. ”

“ One's friend had every virtue because he was one's friend. Secret committees might condemn, Parliament might degrade, juries might convict, impartial history might stigmatize, but one's friend remained one's friend all the same; and if one had the gift of verse, was to be held up to the admiration of time and eternity in a glorifying epitaph. We have fallen on more prosaic days now; the living admirer of a modern Craggs would leave his epitaph unwritten if he could not make facts and feelings fit better in together. ”

“ Walpole was a man eminently qualified to obtain influence over the House of Commons, and to keep it up when he had once obtained it. No man could have promised less in the beginning. That was an acute observer who divined the genius of Cromwell under Cromwell's homely exterior when he first came up to Parliament. Almost as much acuteness would have been needed to enable any one to see the future Prime-minister of England and master of the House of Commons in the plain, unpromising form, the homely, almost stolid countenance, the ungainly movements and gestures of Walpole. ”

“ The civilized world is visited with this epidemic of project and speculation from time to time. In the reign of George the First such a mania attacked England much more fiercely than it had done even in the days of Ben Jonson. It came to us this time from France. The close of a great war is always a tempting and a favorable time for such enterprises. Finances are out of order; a season of spurious commercial activity has come to an end; new resources are to be sought for somehow; and man must change to be other than he is when he wholly ceases to believe in financial miracle-working. ”

“ George the Elector was in his petty way an ambitious Hanoverian prince, however little interest he had in English affairs. He had always been anxious to get possession of the districts of Bremen and Verden, which had been handed over to Sweden at the Peace of Westphalia. Reckless enterprise had carried Charles the Twelfth—"Swedish Charles," with "a frame of adamant, a soul of fire," whom no dangers frighted, and no labors tired, the "unconquered lord of pleasure and of pain"—too far in the rush of his chivalrous madness. His vaulting ambition had overleaped itself, and fallen on the other side ”

“ William had established a new dynasty and a new system, which was no sooner established than it had to be succeeded by the introduction to the throne of one of the daughters of the displaced House of Stuart. England had not had time to become attached, or even reconciled, to any of these succeeding rulers, and the English people in general—the English people outside the circle of courts and Parliament and politics—were well satisfied when George came to the throne to let any one wear the crown who did not make himself and his system absolutely intolerable to the nation. ”

“ He even took more than once a certain kind of part in politics—that is in pamphleteering; he tried to be the inspiration and the guiding-star of Pulteney and other rising men who had come, for one reason or another, to detest Walpole. But even these soon began to find Bolingbroke rather more of a hinderance than a help, and were glad to shake him off and be rid of him. He becomes everything by turns; plays at cool philosophy and philosophic retreat; is always assuring the world in tones of highly suspicious eagerness that he is done forever with it and its works and pomps ”

“ Men of letters and statesmen, men of the robe and men of the sword, lawyers, dandies, poets, and philosophers, met there to discuss politics, literature, scandal, and the play. There were often very strange figures among the motley crowd behind the red-curtained windows of a St. James's coffee-house. The gentleman who made himself so agreeable to the bar-maid or who chatted so affably about the conduct of the allies or the latest news from Sweden, might meet you again later on if your road lay at all outside town, and imperiously request you to stand and deliver. ”

“ The spirit of political freedom, as we now understand it, had not yet even begun to glimmer upon the counsels of statesmen. The idea had not yet arisen in the minds of Englishmen—even of men as able as Walpole—that liberty meant anything more than liberty for the expression of one's own opinions, and for the carrying into action of one's own policy. Those who were in power immediately made it their business to strengthen their own hands, and to prevent as far as possible the growth of opinions, the expression of ideas, unfavorable to themselves. ”

“ He acted with that shrewd, hard common-sense which was an attribute of his family, and which often served instead of genius or enlightenment or intelligence, or even experience. A man of infinitely higher capacity than George might have found himself puzzled as to his proper policy under conditions entirely new and unfamiliar; but George acted as if the conditions were familiar to him, and set about governing England as he would have set about managing his household in Hanover ”

“ He was not a man whom danger could make afraid. At the most critical moments—as, for instance, at the outbreak of the rebellion in 1715—he never lost his head. If he was not capable of seeing far, he saw clearly, and he could look coming events steadily in the face. On one or two occasions, when an important choice had to be made between this political course and that, he chose quickly and well. The fact that he thoroughly appreciated the wisdom and the political integrity, of Walpole speaks, perhaps, his highest praise. His reign, on the whole, was one of prosperity for England. ”

“ The humblest of historians as well as the greatest may ask himself what is the principle of history which bids us to assign so much more space to the wars of kings and the controversies of statesmen than to the life and the deeds of a man like Newton. In the whole history of the world during Newton's lifetime, the one most important fact, the one fact of which the magnitude dwarfs all other facts, is the discovery of the principle of gravitation. ”

“ The profligacy of Charles the Second had little that was joyous in it. James Stuart, the Chevalier, had not the abilities and the culture of Charles the Second, and he had much the same taste for intrigue and dissipation. His amours were already beginning to be a scandal, and he drank now and then like a man determined at all cost to drown thought. He was always the slave of women. Women knew all his secrets, and were made acquainted with his projected political enterprises. ”

“ His fame was first established by the ability with which he conducted his part of the defence of the seven bishops in James the Second's reign. His consistent devotion to the Whig party, and his just and almost prescient appreciation of the true principles of that party, set him in sharp contrast to other statesmen of the time—to men like Marlborough and Shrewsbury and Bolingbroke. His is a noble figure, even in its decay, and the historian of such a time parts from him with regret, feeling that the average of public manhood and virtue is lowered when Somers is gone. ”

“ There is no doubt that Law was a man of great ability as a financier, and that his scheme in the beginning had promise in it. It was, as Burke has said of the scheme and its author, the public enthusiasm, and not Law himself, which chose to build on the base of his scheme a structure which it could not bear. It does not seem by any means certain that a project quite as wild might not be launched in London or Paris at the present day, and find almost as great a temporary success, and blaze, like Law's, the comet of a season. ”

“ A dull, stolid, and profligate king, fond of drink and of low conversation, without dignity of appearance or manner, without sympathy of any kind with the English people and English ways, and without the slightest knowledge of the English language, was suddenly thrust upon the people and proclaimed their king. Fortunately for the Hanoverian dynasty, the English people, as a whole, had grown into a mood of comparative indifference as to who should rule them so long as they were let alone. ”

“ Such a yearly sum "may be looked upon as a trifle by a gentleman of a large estate and easy circumstances, but a poor man feels sometimes severely the want of a shilling; many a poor man has for want of a shilling been obliged to pawn the only whole coat he had to his back, and has never been able to redeem it again. Even a farthing to a poor man is a considerable sum; what shifts do the frugal among them make to save even a farthing!"
Had all Pulteney's speech been animated by this spirit he would have made out an unanswerable case. ”

“ It has been said of him that the reason for his being so successful with women as a young man was that he took money of them. Yet, as another striking instance of the paradoxical nature of his character, he was intensely devoted to his wife. He was the true lover of Sarah Jennings, who afterwards became Duchess of Marlborough. A man of the most undaunted courage in the presence of the enemy, he was his wife's obedient, patient, timid slave. He lived more absolutely under her control than Belisarius under the government of his unscrupulous helpmate. ”

“ On September 17, Norroy, King at Arms, came solemnly down to the House of Lords and razed the names of Ormond and of Bolingbroke from the roll of peers. Bolingbroke had some consolation of a sham kind. He had wished and schemed to be Earl of Bolingbroke before his fall, and now his new king, James of St. Germains, had given him the patent of enhanced nobility. If he ceased to be a viscount in the eyes of English peers and of English heralds, he was still an earl in the Pretender's court. Bolingbroke had too keen a sense of humor not to be painfully aware of the irony of the situation. ”

“ The modern principle of loyalty to a sovereign is that which, having decided in favor of monarchical government and of an hereditary succession, resolves to abide by that choice, and for the sake of the principle and of the country to pay all respect and homage to the person of the chosen ruler. But the loyalty which still clung to the fading fortunes of the Stuarts was very different from this, and came into direct contrast with the feelings shown by the majority of the people of England towards the House of Hanover. ”

“ It is only doing bare justice to one whose character and career have met with little favor from history, contemporary or recent, to say that James might have made his way to the throne with comparative ease if he would only consent to change his religion and become a Protestant. It was again and again pressed upon him by English adherents, and even by statesmen in power—by Oxford and by Bolingbroke—that if he could not actually become a Protestant he should at least pretend to become one, and give up all outward show of his devotion to the Catholic Church. ”

“ Most people, even still, read history by the light of ideas which prevailed up to the close of George the First's reign. We are all ready enough to admit that in our time it would not be a free system which suppressed or prevented the expression of other men's opinions, or which attached any manner of penal consequence to the profession of one creed or the adhesion to one party. ”

“ He must be called a statesman; and, despite the vulgarity of some of his vices, he has to be called a gentleman as well. He could be trusted; he would keep his word once given. Other statesmen could treat with him, and not fear that he would break a promise or betray a confidence. How rare such qualities were at that day among the politicians of any country the readers of the annals of Queen Anne do not need to be told. The Regent's principal adviser at this time was a man quite as immoral, and also quite as able, as himself—the Abbé Dubois, afterwards Cardinal and Prime-minister. ”

“ He had done more than any other man to make the House of Commons the most powerful factor in the government of England; he had therefore made a seat in the House of Commons an object of the highest ambition. To sit in that House made the obscurest country gentleman a power in the State. Naturally, therefore, a seat in the House of Commons was struggled for, scrambled for, fought for—obtained at any cost of money, influence, time, and temper. ”