left half a crown to a beggarly Scotchman to draw the trigger after his death.' It would be a strong corroboration of the justice of Johnson's estimate of Bolingbroke's character, and would prove that he was a scoundrel and a coward' in politics as well as in morals, if it should appear that he had charged another blunderbuss against his political friends and colleagues, and after keeping it by him all his life, left to his executor the safe but dirty task of drawing the trigger, when he himself was beyond all danger from the explosion.

Again-When Bolingbroke collected into a volume 'Oldcastle's Letters to the Craftsman on the History of England,' it was answered by a ministerial pamphlet, and, on a reply by Bolingbroke, by another:-the first of these answers Mr. Cooke tells us was supposed to have been written by Sir Robert Walpole himself;-the second, as he asserts, undoubtedly was,

This attack (Bolingbroke's reply, which was very abusive of Walpole) was not suffered to go unpunished. It was answered by Walpole in a pamphlet equal to that of Bolingbroke in the keenness of its irony and the beauty of its style.'-vol. ii. p. 78.

We wish Mr. Cooke had favoured us with his authority for making this statement. Horace Walpole, in his anxiety to insert the name of his father in the Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors, mentions everything that could be, by any possibility, attributed to him from a pamphlet in 1710, of which he had himself forgotten the title, to a short private letter to his son-in-law Charles Churchill, which was handed about till it got into print ;'—' but to help out this meagre record there is no mention ofwhat would indeed have been a literary triumph-a contest with Bolingbroke, in which Walpole should have equalled his antagonist in keenness of wit and brilliancy of style. Mr. Cooke was bound to have told us where he had discovered so remarkable and honourable a feature in the character of Sir Robert, which his lite-. rary and very inquisitive son had never heard of,-which wholly escaped the industry of Archdeacon Coxe,-which old Horace Walpole, when he undertook a formal answer to the misrepresentations of Bolingbroke, never mentions, and which Lord Hardwicke, in his Walpoliana-(a collection of curious notes on Sir Robert, whom he knew well and greatly admired)—never alludes The fact is incredible;-but Mr. Cooke, in addition to the historical mistake in this case, makes a very remarkable literary one, by adding

to.

The style of this pamphlet is fine, but there is a mannerism about it which serves to identify it as Walpole's.'-vol. ii. p. 78.

Now everybody knows that Walpole's style was anything but fine, and Lord Hardwicke expressly states that he neither studied style

nor

nor wrote correctly. And the mannerism' imputed shows that Mr. Cooke does not know the meaning of the word—he says that Walpole had a fine taste in pictures, and that there are several allusions to the old masters in this pamphlet. If all this were true, (which we doubt,) we beg leave to inform Mr. Cooke that it would not be mannerism.

The most important incident in Lord Bolingbroke's life, after his first flight in 1715, and the most obscure of all, was his second secession to France in 1735. Of that important and unaccountable proceeding, we naturally expected some explanation from Mr. Cooke-all that Goldsmith and the Biographia had said being wholly unsatisfactory. But no. Mr. Cooke does nothing but repeat the vague surmises of his predecessors, in language still more indistinct

Affairs at last arrived at what the opposition believed to be a crisis, and the fall of the minister was thought to be inevitable. The people were in the highest state of excitement against the Excise Bill, then before the House; mobs besieged the houses of parliament, calling for its rejection; cockades with the words "Liberty, Property, and no Excise," were publicly worn :-all things portended Walpole's downfall, and the opposition looked upon their work as done.

While the prey was in view, the pursuers had been ardent and unanimous; now that it appeared to be within their grasp, their exertions were feeble and disunited. Bolingbroke found that the same selfishness and jealousy which he had always experienced in political coadjutors was not banished from the counsels of his present friends. In the commencement of the struggle, they had drawn their weapons of opposition from the armoury of the constitution, and their temper and excellence had alone brought them to the very point of success: now, however, they were thrown aside, and the instruments of faction were adopted in their stead. Even these were turned against each other in domestic contest; and Bolingbroke grew disgusted with a cause which was no longer recommended by patriotism or honour. He had long ceased to be the slave of the Tory party; he had long ceased to consider the support of a faction the business of his life. Adversity, and the reflection it induced, had taught him juster views of the duty of a statesman: he was now only the servant of his country. Now, when his companions in opposition were supposed to be upon the very eve of success, Bolingbroke refused to abandon this better principle, which misfortune had taught him to take up. Immediately the expectation of power had blinded them to the object which they had before steadily pursued, he seceded from them, and declared his part was over: no promises or entreaties could induce him any longer to continue his support.

6

The attempt upon which Pulteney and his friends had counted with such certainty, signally failed. The majority which they expected was decisively against them. The king, whom they supposed

dissatisfied

dissatisfied with his minister, firmly supported him. The popular tumults, upon the abandonment of the obnoxious bill, subsided; and Walpole was again secure. It might be supposed, that when the cause of disunion was withdrawn, the effect would cease, and that Bolingbroke would have again joined the disappointed leader of the independent Whigs. But he had for ever broken the chain which riveted him to any cause having even the semblance of a party character. He determined to retire again into France-a country which his determination to retire from all interference with public affairs, and his lady's declining health, particularly recommended to him.'pp. 89-91.

Was there ever anything more vague and unintelligible? Was there ever such miserable twaddle as representing Bolingbroke quarrelling with the faction he had himself created, because it grew 'factious' and used arguments not drawn from the armoury of the constitution?' But, admitting that absurdity, Mr. Cooke ought to have told us upon what constitutional point this rupture had taken place. What was the object about which he and his friends differed? What principle did they abandon to which he adhered? How was he who had 'now become only the servant of his country'-(meaning the servant of his country only)-how was he to serve his country by leaving it? In short, what was the real and precise cause of this strange and sudden movement? The foregoing passage assuredly does not tell us; but a little after Mr. Cooke reverts to the subject

It has been before stated, that the conduct of Pulteney and his friends disgusted him with the coalition party which he had joined, and that he had determined again to retire into France. This resolution he put in practice about January, 1735, retiring with his wife to a retreat called Chantelou, near Fontainbleau,* where he intended to pass the remainder of his days.

Mr. Cooke does not seem to have recognised in this retreat, Chanteloup, one of the most celebrated chateaux of France; which happens, by the bye, to be situated an hundred miles from Fontainbleau.

And in a note on a passage on one of Pope's letters, in which he says that Lady Bolingbroke's son-in-law was governor of Fontainbleau, Mr. Cooke adds, This must have been a son of the Marquis de la Villette by his first wife: the Marquise (Lady Bolingbroke) never had any children' (ii. 204). If this were true, the governor would have been the lady's step-son, and not her son-in-law. Mr. Cooke had told us, a few pages earlier,—in one of Bolingbroke's letters, preserved among the Townshend Papers, he mentions the marriage of the Marquis de Villette's daughter by his first wife, and adds, that her step-mother had resigned her pensions to her." On referring, however, to the Townshend letter (Coxe, ii. 327), it turns out that Mr. Cooke is every way wrong; that letter says, that the young lady was neither the Marquise's step-daughter nor her daughter-in-law, but her daughter; and the note adds, that she was her daughter by her first husband, M. de la Villette. Bolingbroke himself also states, that he had made an advantageous match for 'Lady Bolingbroke's daughter' with a gentleman, who thus became, as Pope properly calls him, Lady Bolingbroke's son-in-law, and was no doubt the governor of Fontainbleau. These things are worth noticing, to show that Mr. Cooke contradicts the very authorities which he cites, and that no faith is to be put in the accuracy of his quotations. · This

This departure of the great leader of the opposition did not pass without comment. The satellites of the ministry celebrated it as a triumph, and their opponents mourned it as a misfortune.. Among the absurd reports which the insolence of party could propagate and its credulity receive, was one that he was driven abroad by an attack made upon him by Sir Robert Walpole in the House of Commons.'p. 156.

This supposition Mr. Cooke rejects with high indignation-not without some censure of Archdeacon Coxe for having given it so much countenance as to repeat the speech, which Mr. Cooke rerepeats, and then asks with some contempt of Sir Robert's oratory, whether such a speech could have been the weapon of Bolingbroke's political death? If it was, says Mr. Cooke, he must have been more sensitive than usual, for the speech was nothing more than one of those virulent pieces of abuse which the minister frequently launched at him. Mr. Cooke, with characteristic naïveté, thinks a speech can be nothing more than a speech, and that he who had stood the abuse of the ministerial press could hardly have been driven from his country' by a species of abuse he was so well used to. Does Mr. Cooke not see that newspaper libels are one thing, and a speech, even though only a speech, made in full parliament on a solemn occasion by a powerful and exasperated prime minister, is another? Can he not understand that it was not the mere oratorical vigour of the speech which might alarm Bolingbroke, but the spirit of practical hostility which it avowed, and the knowledge of Bolingbroke's guilty practices which-to his own conscience-it might reveal? It was the moral and political force, and not, as Mr. Cooke understands it, the mere cleverness of the speech, to which Archdeacon Coxe could have attributed so much effect. In this speech there is a frequent allusion to certain practices of Bolingbroke with foreign ministers-even that does not open Mr. Cooke's eyes; on it he observes

The charge of intriguing with foreign ambassadors was perhaps well founded; but there was nothing very shocking or even very novel in the accusation: such a practice had long been a mere ordinary engine of opposition, and had been used by Walpole himself and his party to an unexampled extent, when their object was to delay and embarrass the negociations for the treaty of Utrecht.'-pp. 160, 161. As if a tu quoque were a plea in bar to an indictment for high treason, and as if there was a perfect similarity established between one class of intrigues in 1710, of which we know little, and another class in 1735, of which we know nothing at all-but which latter must have been (if they existed at all) very different in character, in extent, and in legal guilt. But these considerations, obvious as we think them, are far beyond Mr. Cooke. He proceeds,

⚫ Other rumours were circulated with regard to his ulterior intentions. It was known that he had left England in disgust, and it was surmised that he had left it with the intention of rejoining the Pretender. Even some of his friends gave credit to this supposition, and Swift did not hesitate to state publicly that he believed it to be a fact. Pope, however, judged more favourably and more justly of his friend, and sharply reproved the dean for his unfounded assertion.' *—vol. ii. p. 161.

Here we have a reference to the ninth volume of Warton's edition of Pope's Works, where no passage bearing on the point is to be found; but turning, as we so often find it necessary to do, from the volume Mr. Cooke quotes to that which he does not mention, we find in Goldsmith the substance of Mr. Cooke's statement, divested of its mistakes:

Many of his friends, as well as enemies, supposed that he was once more gone over to the Pretender. Among the number who entertained this suspicion was Swift, whom Pope, in one of his letters, very roundly chides for harbouring such an unjust suspicion. "You should be cautious," he says, "of censuring any motion or action of Lord Bolingbroke, because you hear it from a shallow, envious, and malicious reporter. What you writ to me about him, I find, to my great scandal, repeated in one of yours to another; whatever you might hint to me, was this for the profane? The thing, if true, should be concealed; but it is, I assure you, absolutely untrue in every circumstance. He makes it his whole business vacare literis.” '. Goldsmith's Life of Bolingbroke, lxiii.

Here we have a fresh instance of Mr. Cooke's disingenuousness in borrowing from one work and citing another—of the infidelity of his quotations and of the blind credulity with which he swallows, without examination, whatever he finds in the former biographies which he affects to despise.

But as to the fact itself, we begin by observing, that Goldsmith's idea that this mysterious reproof of Pope's referred to a suspicion that Bolingbroke was gone to join the Pretender, is copied from the 'Biographia,' and seems to be a mere conjecture of the writer of the article, unsupported by any tittle of evidence, or even by the most distant previous allusion. The letter of Swift's, to which Pope's is a reply, is not to be found in the volume to which Mr. Cooke refers-nor anywhere else but more of this point, as regards Bolingbroke himself, anon at present we are only considering Mr. Cooke's statement. Pope, we see, says that Swift had hinted a censure on some (unstated) motion or action of Bolingbroke's;' and this Mr. Cooke misrepresents in so outrageous a manner as to assert that 'Swift did not hesitate TO STATE PUBLICLY that he believed it to

Pope to Swift.-Pope's Works, vol. ix,

be