of the most brilliant wit,—the most accomplished litterateur,—the ablest statesman,—the most eloquent orator,-the most fashionable beau,— and the most reckless debauchee of the age. The idle compliment and commonplace of fashionable life was mingled with abstruse reflections on themes of mysterious import, and the gay badinage of the saloon was succeeded, at no long interval, by the grave deliberations of the council-chamber. The evening which was commenced by advocating in the senate persecution as a method of propagating true religion, was not unfrequently concluded in heating and exhausting his fine imagination to deify the prostitute of the night, and in devastating his constitution by bacchanalian revelry. To be pre-eminent alike in the solemn pageantries of a court and the deep counsels of a senate,—in the world of fashion and the world of letters,-in pleasure and in business,—in the intrigues of a libertine and the intrigues of a politician, was the aim of this Alcibiades of modern times. And it must be confessed, that few men have performed so many different parts with equal success. In after life, when his attainder prevented him from taking any active part in politics, and the fulness of enjoyment had brought a satiety of pleasure, he carried the same proud spirit into philosophy. Not only aspiring at the possession of universal knowledge, but also to be the sole arbiter and lord-paramount in every department of literature on which his pen was exercised, he attempts to exact from mankind a homage which would be refused to abilities far greater than his, employed for a life-time on a tithe of the vast domain over which he ranges. To use Tillotson's fine language, it was his purpose," by a vast and imperious mind, and a heart as large as the sands on the sea-shore, to command all the knowledge of nature and art, of words and things; to attain to a mastery in all languages, and sound the depths of all arts and sciences,-measure the earth and the heavens, and tell the stars, and declare their orders and motions,-to discourse of the interest of all states, the intrigues of all courts, the reason of all civil laws and constitutions, and to give an account of the history of all ages. "z Thus arrogant, thus vast in his aspirations,—and, with a heart unteachable by the sweet uses of adversity, it is not a matter of surprise, that he met the common fate of those who have not taken due measure of their own capacity; that, of the multifarious projects in which he engaged, not one came to perfection, with the solitary exception of the treaty of Utrecht,-that his whole life was a series of fruitless struggles,-and that his proud heart, after so many mortifications, became corroded with all malevolence, and a prey to its own passions. He stands, for the instruction of posterity, a monument of blighted ambition,-vast in dimensions, and stately in the framework, but scathed and blasted by deep scars of thunder. Having now spoken of Bolingbroke's moral qualifications, it only remains for us to offer a few observations on the quæstio vexata of his mental character. No man in ancient or modern times received a larger measure of applause from his contempories, whether friends or enemies. The theme of Swift's warmest panegyrics,-the god of Pope's idolatry, and esteemed the miracle of an age not undistinguished by great names, it might have been anticipated that his remains would have Sermon On the wisdom of being religious.' been greedily sought after by posterity, and perused with an almost reverential admiration. Yet so much do succeeding generations differ in their opinion, that scarcely one man in ten knows him to have been any thing more than a statesman, and not one in a hundred has made himself acquainted with his writings. Perhaps it is not very difficult to assign the cause of this apparent anomaly. Bolingbroke's abilities were exactly of that stamp which astonish and fascinate those who come into personal contact with their possessor,—more brilliant than solid,- -more showy than substantial. His mind was not a profound one; but what it wanted in this respect was atoned for by its readiness and acuteness. He seemed to grasp every thing by intuition, and no sooner had he made himself master of a proposition or an argument, than his astonishing memory enabled him to bring forth vast stores of information and illustration at a moment's warning. Endowed with a brilliant imagination, a prodigious flow of words,-a style which fascinates the reader by the incomparable beauty of the language and the bounding elasticity of the sentences, and an extraordinary power of presenting his conceptions in the clearest possible light,-his contemporaries looked upon him as one of those rare beings who seem to be endowed with a nature superior to that of common mortality, and who stoop down to the world only to evince their mastery of all its lore, and their superiority to its inhabitants. But, dazzled as they were by the vast surface of the stream, they forgot to inquire into its depth. We, in modern times, who know nothing of the artificial splendour with which a "form excelling human,”- —a manner that seemed given to sway mankind,-and a most dazzling style of conversation, invested the name of Bolingbroke, are perhaps inclined, by the exaggeration of the praise once lavished on him, to do him but scanty justice. Nevertheless, it must strike the reader of his works, that he nowhere exhibits a power of carrying on a continuous train of thought; that he never fairly grapples with any subject, but contents himself with pointing out its weaknesses and illustrating its minor features; that no lofty thought or original reflection escapes from him; that he is an acute observer, but a shallow thinker,-a clever rhetorician, but an illogical reasoner. His political writings are indeed occasionally distinguished by a vigorous and well-conducted style of argumentation; but we know not more tame and impotent specimens of deduction than his Philosophical Essays.' The boasted First Philosophy is founded on a congeries of confuted fallacies and shallow sophistries, on which it would be impossible to build any edifice more substantial than a limbo of vanity. The unabashed assurance with which he pronounces his dictum on the merits of his predecessors and contemporaries, the tacit assumption which he makes of his own superiority, the various character and prodigious extent of his erudition, superficial as it unquestionably was, the variety and happiness of his illustrations,-the brilliancy of his metaphors, and, above all, the inimitable graces of his style, combining with the form of an essay the spirit and fire of an oration, have imposed upon the vulgar; but those who can look beneath the surface will discover, without much difficulty, that the inside of the cup and the platter is scarcely answerable to the splendour of the external show. Such was the life and character of Lord Viscount Bolingbroke,man of whom it may be truly said that he performed nothing to entitle |