office and much popular ignominy was heaped upon him. William had raised him to the peerage as Baron Halifax, but during the whole of Anne's reign he was out of office. Nevertheless, he remained the constant friend of men of letters. He promoted the fortunes of Isaac Newton, who was his lifelong friend; of Addison, Steele, Prior, Congreve and many others. Swift and Pope alone were hostile to him, and after his death spoke of him, Swift slightingly, but Pope with the bitterest acrimony.

Swift wrote:

While Montague, who claimed the station

To be Mæcenas of the nation,

For poets often table kept,

But ne'er considered where they slept ;

Himself as rich as fifty Jews,

Was easy though they wanted shoes.

In the epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, Pope characterizes Montague as Bufo :

Proud as Apollo on his forked hill,

Sat full-blown Bufo, puffed by every quill;
Fed with soft dedication all day long,
Horace and he went hand in hand in song,
His library (where busts of poets dead
And a true Pindar stood without a head)
Received of wits an undistinguished race,
Who first his judgment asked, and then a place;

Much they extolled his pictures, much his seat,
And flattered every day, and some day eat;
Till grown more frugal in his riper days

He paid some bards with port and some with praise.

These verses have little worth and simply exhibit the malevolence of the poet, who quarreled with and maligned every friend he ever had save Arbuthnot, Swift and Bolingbroke. Addison

and Steele have left on record their estimate of Montague, and if they praised him as a poet too highly, as a man they gave him no greater credit than he deserved. He was the patron and rewarder of literature, and we owe to him much in that literature that is imperishable.

On the death of Queen Anne, Halifax became one of the regents of the government pending the arrival of George I., and soon after that monarch's accession he was made an earl, knight of the Garter and first commissioner of the treasury. He did not long enjoy his new honors. He died at the age of fifty-four and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

BOLINGBROKE,

WIT, ORATOR AND STATESMAN.

(1678-1751.)

Awake, my St. John! leave all meaner things
To low ambition and the pride of kings.
Let us (since life can little more supply
Than just to look about us, and to die)
Expatiate free o'er all this scene of man ;
A mighty maze, but not without a plan.

SUCH are the opening lines, as everybody knows, of Pope's "Essay on Man," though everybody may not know that the St. John to whom they were addressed was the celebrated Lord Bolingbroke, wit, orator and statesman, and that he not only inspired the poem, but in a great measure wrote out in prose the ideas contained in it. Indeed, it has been asserted that Bolingbroke originally composed the "Essay on Man" in prose and Pope turned it into rhyme. But this, as Dr. Johnson has said, is too strongly stated. The imagery of the poem is Pope's, though the philosophic basis is undoubtedly Bolingbroke's.

Of the great men of Queen Anne's reign Bolingbroke is one of the most interesting. Macaulay calls him a brilliant knave, but he was much more, if not better, than that. For many years, indeed, he led a wild and dissipated life and gained for himself the appellation of "the modern Alcibiades"; but he was a statesman, a scholar, a wit, the master of a superb English style and a political thinker and writer of great power. His name will always be associated with Pope and Swift. With the former he lived on terms of the most intimate friendship, while the latter was his most powerful lieutenant in those stormy times that marked the closing years of the reign of Queen Anne. Swift's writings, particularly the " Journal to Stella," are full of Bolingbroke, for whom he had a very great admiration. In one place he writes to Stella:

I think Mr. St. John the greatest young man I ever knew: wit, capacity, beauty, quickness of apprehension, good learning and an excellent taste; the best orator in the House of Commons, admirable conversation, good nature and good manners; generous and a despiser of money. His only fault is talking to his friends in a way of complaint of too great a load of business, which looks a little like affectation; and he endeavors too much to mix the fine gentleman and man of pleasure with the man of business.

In another place he calls him "the greatest

commoner in England," and that parliament can do nothing without him.

Henry St. John, who subsequently was raised to the peerage as Viscount Bolingbroke, was born in 1678. His father was one of the roisterers of Charles II.'s time, and died an unreclaimed rake at the age of ninety in the reign of George II. On his mother's side St. John was descended from the Earl of Warwick, the kingmaker. He was brought up by his grandparents after a strictly religious fashion and was educated at Eton and Christ Church College, Oxford. He early attracted notice by his vivacity and versatility, his prodigious memory and his acquisition of knowledge. He equally attracted notice by his dissipations, excesses and profligacy while yet a stripling.

It was the fashion in those days for men of fashion and pleasure to cultivate the society of wits and men of letters, and St. John became intimate with Dryden in his declining years and with Pope, Swift, Addison, Steele and Prior as they were coming on the stage. He occasionally wrote verses of an ingenious and pleasing character, though not very notable as poetry. Some eulogistic lines from his pen are prefixed to Dryden's translation of Virgil.