accuracy. If so, it were better to put up with the present 1-inch map, disband the surveyors, send the sappers to their duty, and dismiss to other employments the most scientific staff of officers that the world has ever seen assembled together. France and Sweden, Austria, Bavaria, Russia, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Prussia, Sardinia, and Spain, all have their cadastral surveys in different stages of advancement. Let England, who now has by common consent the palm of scientific accuracy, remain content, like Tuscany, Hesse Darmstadt, and Hanover, with small and inaccurate maps, and leave to future generations the care of filling in the details of our unequalled triangulation. Having commenced our tower, it would be disgraceful and absurd to sit down and decline to finish it, not because we are unable to afford the cost, but because we cannot appreciate the value of the completed structure.

It cannot be too often repeated that the really expensive part of the work has been done and paid for, and that a sum equal to the average annual sum which has actually been expended during the last ten years-voted steadily by Parliament, and applied as Sir Henry James well knows how to apply it will in the course of a few years give us a set of cadastral plans and topographical maps of the British Islands more perfect in accuracy and finish than any that have yet been seen in Europe.

ART. IV.-The Life of Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, Secretary of State in the Reign of Queen Anne. By THOMAS MACKNIGHT. London: 1863.

IF

F Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, cannot be named amongst the worthies of England, he stands in the front rank of her celebrities. The influence he exercised in government and philosophy was more for evil than for good; his course was meteorlike, 'with fear of change perplexing nations;' the light he shed was lurid; but his name is so indissolubly blended with a momentous period of our history, so intimately associated with our Augustan age of literature, that we hail with pleasure every renewed attempt to form an impartial estimate of his genius and character as a statesman, an orator, an author, and a man.

Mr. Macknight is creditably known as a political writer, and his capacity for handling weighty subjects boldly and comprehensively may be inferred from his book on Burke; although

we do not precisely understand why (as he states to have been the fact) that work should have led to the one before us; no two men who have played equally conspicuous parts being less like each other than the author of the 'Patriot King' and the author of the Essay on the French Revolution,'-the moral and religious friend of Johnson, and the philosophic prompter of Pope. Neither of them, it is true, has been the subject of a work so written as to preclude rivalry; and Mr. Macknight probably thought that, having contended on equal terms with Mr. Prior, he might without presumption challenge comparison with Mr. Wingrove Cooke, the best and most complete of the previous biographers of Bolingbroke. With evident reference to this competitor, he states that the narrative has not been based on any former work;' that 'it will be found to differ materially 'from every other publication of the kind in the estimate of 'Bolingbroke himself, in the representation of the most im'portant facts of his life and the motives of his actions, as well 'as in the view of his cotemporaries in relation to himself.'

Mr. Macknight is certainly not an imitator; he chooses his own path, and treads it firmly and confidently. We are also disposed to rely fully on his assurance that he has consulted every accessible book and manuscript on the subject, for his diligence in this direction is proved by the results. But his execution is hardly on a par with his conception: we cannot say of his book materiem superabat opus: the contrary would be a nearer approximation to the truth; and in so practised a writer we are not unfrequently at a loss to account for the slovenliness of the style, as well as for the perfunctory manner in which valuable documentary evidence has been sifted and employed. Between him and Mr. Wingrove Cooke, however, the career of their common hero may now be regarded as completely unrolled and emblazoned for the inspection and edification of posterity.

Claiming descent, paternally or maternally, from William St. John, who held a high command in the Norman army at the battle of Hastings, and Adam de Port, a Saxon magnate, Bolingbroke used to boast that he united in his person the noblest blood of both races-the conquering and the conquered. He was born heir to a baronetcy and a good estate; although, in consequence of the long life of his father, he gained nothing by inheritance till his career was verging to its close. The precise day of his birth is uncertain; that of his baptism is October 10th, 1678; and writing on New Year's Day, 1738, he says: Some months hence I shall be three score.' We hear nothing of his mother, a daughter of the Earl of Warwick;

and his father, who died an unreclaimed rake at ninety, gladly abandoned the care of his education to his grandmother, Lady St. John, who professed puritanical opinions, and (as the phrase goes) sate under Daniel Burgess. Mr. Wingrove Cooke accuses this divine of downright fanaticism; whilst Mr. Macknight, with, we think, better reason, insists that his many smart sayings should be admitted in mitigation, if not refutation, of the charge. Thus he defined thorough-paced doctrine to be that which comes in at one ear, passes straight through the head, and goes out at the other; and said that the children of Jacob were called Israelites because the Almighty had always hated Jacobites. These gentlemen are also at issue on the degree of weight to be attached to a sentence in one of Bolingbroke's letters to Pope:-It puts me in mind of a puritanical parson, 'Dr. Manton, who, if I mistake not-for I have never looked ' into the folio since I was a boy, and condemned sometimes to 'read in it—made a hundred and nineteen sermons on the hun'dred and nineteenth Psalm.' Lord Stanhope's version is, that his (St. John's) early education was directed by a puritanical mother, whose imprudent zeal compelled him painfully 'to peruse large tomes of controversial divinity when far too young to understand their value, and thus perhaps implanted in his mind the first seeds of his aversion to the truths of revelation.'

Still we agree with Mr. Macknight, that, if an ascetic system of education was ever meditated or commenced, it was ill continued by sending the lad to Eton, where the habits, manners, and mode of tuition were (as now) essentially of a mundane character. In his Memoirs of the Last Ten Years of George the Second,' Horace Walpole states that his father and Bolingbroke had set out rivals at school;' and Coxe, in his Memoirs of Sir Robert Walpole,' relying probably on this authority, says that during his continuance at Eton he (Sir Robert) had been the rival of St. John, who was three years older than himself.' An obvious error in this passage is afterwards corrected by a note, showing that St. John was in fact two years younger instead of three years older. The difference of age either way, as well as the respective habits and characters of the lad, preclude the notion of any marked rivalry at that time; and the contemptuous surprise subsequently expressed by the younger of the two at the other's rising influence in the House of Commons, seems to show that he had not been regarded as a serious competitor in boyhood.

On leaving Eton, St. John was entered of Christchurch College, Oxford, where he speedily attracted notice by his

vivacity and versatility, his remarkable quickness of perception, and the variety of knowledge which his prodigious strength of memory enabled him to accumulate by fits and starts during a course of study of the most desultory kind. The late Lord Macaulay used to complain that he could not forget the very exercises he had learnt at school; and St. John playfully alleged a similar tenacity of memory as an excuse for not cumbering his mind with too much book-learning. Under every disadvantage he learned so much that he was suspected of the not uncommon affectation of pretending an unreal idleness. His dissipation, however, was certainly not pretended; it was conspicuous in times which had witnessed the wild excesses of the Wilmots and Sedleys. An old gentleman told Goldsmith that he himself had seen St. John and some of his boon companions running naked through the park, and his connexion with Miss Gumley, the most dashing woman of the day, was notorious before he was well quit of the University. Fortunately, it was then the fashion for men of wit and pleasure about town to cultivate the society of men of letters, and his intimacy with Dryden is illustrated by an anecdote in The Lives of the 'Poets.' On one occasion, when St. John was sitting with the poet, a visitor was announced. This,' said Dryden, is Tonson. You will take care not to depart before he goes away, for I have not completed the sheet which I promised him; and if you leave me unprotected I must suffer all the rudeness to which his resentment can prompt his tongue.' Johnson must have had a peculiar pleasure in telling the story, for this was the selfsame Tonson whom he beat, or (as some said) knocked down with a folio, for impertinence.

A copy of eulogistic verses by St. John is prefixed to the first edition of Dryden's translation of Virgil, and this is supposed to be the embryo statesman's first public appearance in print. It is not a favourable one, and (with perhaps one exception) his subsequent attempts in verse are equally devoid of poetic merit. They were fortunately limited to Almahide, an Ode,' produced in 1700, a vapid and laboured affair, in which the writer intimates that after a vain search for the abode of Wisdom and Philosophy, he had returned to the Muses and to love; a prologue to the Earl of Orrery's tragedy of Altemira,' and two or three copies of verses to his mistresses. The best of these was addressed to a nymph named Clara, who sold oranges in the lobby of the Court of Requests, which (as may be learnt from the Journal to Stella') was then the popular lounging-place. Like Manon Lescaut and La Traviata, she was incorrigible in the vagrancy of her attachments; no

amount of kindness or liberality could keep her faithful to a single lover, and the inevitable consequences are pressed upon her in lines which, in Lord Stanhope's opinion, 'seem to prove ⚫ that had he (St. John) applied himself to poetry, he would have 'excelled in it.' In our judgment, the exquisite comparison by which Lord Macaulay illustrates Montague's poetical talents will exactly fit St. John:- His genius may be compared to ' that pinion which, though it is too weak to lift the ostrich into 'the air, enables her, while she remains on the earth, to outrun hound, horse, and dromedary. As a poet Montague would 'never have soared above the crowd.'

In the interval between leaving Oxford and entering the House of Commons, St. John passed the best part of two years on the Continent; but little is known of his places of sojourn or manner of life there, except that he spent some time at Milan, and acquired in Parisian society that perfect knowledge of the French language which afterwards led to his having the principal conduct of the negotiations ending in the Peace of Utrecht. Soon after his return, when about twenty-two, he married one of the daughters and coheiresses of Sir Henry Winchecomb, Bart., with whom he obtained property enough to support the station at which he aimed, independently of his grandfather and father, whose estates, however, were included in the settlement. The marriage was not a happy one; for St. John, like his unreclaimed Clara, could not be induced to forswear any of his favourite vices so long as he had health, strength, or money for their indulgence; and among his other titles to fashionable fame, he boasted of being able to swallow, without any perceptible effect on his brain, an almost unlimited quantity of burgundy or champagne. It will be seen that he persevered in the frequent display of this accomplishment at seasons when his full powers of mind and body were tasked to the uttermost by state affairs. His youth (says Lord Chesterfield) was distinguished by all the tumult and storm of pleasures, in which he licentiously triumphed, 'disdaining all decorum; and his convivial joys were pushed 'to all the extravagancy of frantic bacchanals. These passions 'were never interrupted but by a stronger ambition. That stronger ambition first came into operation in February 1701, when he entered the House of Commons as member for Wootton Basset.

Faction never ran higher than during his first Session, which was also the last of the troubled reign of William. The Tories were in the ascendant, and used their strength without mercy or moderation. They passed resolution after resolution, in