has since become matter of history, that toast of "William's horse" which had lightened their festivities since his accident:'t would lessen much our woe, had Sorrel stumbled thirteen years ago." And he closed with eloquent mention of the heroic death which Burnet's relation made so distasteful to high church bigotry "No conscious guilt disturb'd his royal breast, Calm as the regions of eternal rest." The sincerity of the grief of De Foe had in this work lifted his verse to a higher and firmer tone. It was a heartfelt grief. There was no speeding the going, welcoming the coming sovereign, for De Foe. Nothing could replace, nothing too gratefully remember, the past. "I never forget his goodness to me," he said, when his own life was wearing to its close. "It was my honor and advantage to call him master as well as sovereign. I never patiently heard his memory slighted, nor ever can do so. Had he lived, he would never have suffered me to be treated as I have been in this world." Ay! good, brave Daniel De Foe! There is indeed but sorry treatment now in store for you. The bill, passed by the tory house of commons, (where Harley had again been chosen speaker,) was defeated by the whig lords, to the ministers' great comfort. But the common people, having begun their revel of high church excitement, were not to be balked so easily. They pulled down a few dissenting chapels; sang high church songs in the streets; insulted known dissenters as they passed; and otherways orthodoxly amused themselves. It seemed to De Foe a little serious. On personal grounds he did not care for the bill, its acceptance, or its rejection; but its political tendency was unsafe; it was designed as an act of oppression; the spirit aroused was dangerous; and the attitude taken by dissenters wanted both dignity and courage. Nor let it be supposed, while he still looked doubtingly on, that he had any personal reason which would not strongly have withheld him from the fray. He had now six children; his affairs were again thriving; the works at Tilbury had reasonably prospered; and passing judgment, by the world's most favored tests, on the house to which he had lately removed at Hackney, on the style in which he lived there, and on the company he kept, it must be said that The accession of Anne was the signal for tory Daniel De Foe was at this time most 66 respectarejoicings. She was thirty-seven, and her char- ble" and well to do. He kept his coach, and visacter was formed and known. It was a compound ited county members. But as the popular rage of weakness and of bigotry, but in some sort these continued, he waived prudential considerations. availed to counteract each other. Devotion to a There was a foul-mouthed Oxford preacher named high church principle was needful to her fearful Sacheverell, who had lately announced from his pulconscience; but reliance on a woman-favorite was pit to that intelligent university, that he could not needful to her feeble mind. She found Marlbor- be a true son of the church who did not lift up her ough and Godolphin in office, where they had banner against the dissenters; who did not hang been placed by their common kinsman, Sunder-out "the bloody flag and banner of defiance;" land; and she raised Godolphin to the post of and this sermon was selling for twopence in the lord-treasurer, and made Marlborough captain- streets. It determined him, he tells us, to delay general. Even if she had not known them to be no longer. He would make an effort to stay the tories, she would yet have done this; for she had plague. And he wrote and published his Shortest been some years under the influence of Marlbor-Way with the Dissenters-without his name, of ough's strong-minded wife, and that influence availed to retain the same advisers when she found them converted whigs. The spirit of the great lives after them; and this weak, superstitious, "good sort of woman," little thought, when she uttered with so much enjoyment the slighting allusions to William in her first speech from the throne, that the legacy of foreign administration left by that great-minded sovereign, would speedily convert the tories, then standing by her side, into undeniable earnest whigs. course. Its drift was to personate the opinions and style of the most furious of the high-flying church party, and to set forth, with perfect gravity and earnestness, the extreme of the ferocious intolerance to which their views and wishes tended. We can conceive nothing so seasonable, or in the execution so inimitably real. We doubt if a finer specimen of serious irony exists in the language. In the only effective mode, it stole a march on the blind bigotry of the one party, and on the torpid At first, all was well with the most highflying dulness of the other. To have spoken to either in churchmen. Jacobites came in with proffered a graver tone, would have called forth a laugh or oaths of allegiance; the "landed interest" rubbed a stare. Only discovery could effect prevention. its hands with anticipation of discountenance to A mine must be sprung, to show the combustibles trade; tantivy parsons cried their loudest halloo in use, and the ruin and disaster they were fraught against dissent; the martyrdom of Charles became with. ""Tis in vain," said the Shortest Way, the theme of pulpits, for comparison of the martyr" to trifle in this matter. We can never enjoy a to the Saviour; and, by way of significant hint of the royal sanctity, and the return of the throne to a more lineal succession, the gift of the royal touch was solemnly revived. Nor did the feeling explode in mere talk, or pass without practical seconding. The ministry introduced a bill against occasional conformity, the drift of which was to disqualify dissenters from all civil employments; and though the ministers themselves were indifferent to it, court bigotry pressed it so hard, that even the queen's husband, himself an occasional conformist, was driven to vote for it. My heart is vid you," he said to Lord Wharton, as he divided against him. It was very charmingly foreign to the purpose. 66 settled uninterrupted union in this nation, till the If a justification of this masterly pamphlet were |monly produce extreme licentiousness in practice. needed, would it not be strikingly visible in the We do not know who defended De Foe; but he existence of a state of society wherein such argu- seems to have been ill defended. He was advised ments as these could be taken to have grave inten- to admit the libel, on a loose assurance in the tion? Gravely, they were so taken. Sluggish, court that a high influence was not indisposed to timid, cowardly dissenters were struck with fear; protect him. He was declared guilty, and senrabid high churchmen shouted approval. A Cam-tenced to pay a fine of two hundred marks, to stand bridge fellow wrote to thank his bookseller for three times in the pillory, to be imprisoned during having sent him so excellent a treatise, it being, the queen's pleasure, and to find sureties for good next to the Holy Bible and the Sacred Comments, behavior for seven years. Alas, for the fate of the most valuable he had ever seen. But then Wit in this world! De Foe was taken back to came a whisper of its true intention, and the note Newgate, and told to prepare for the pillory. The suddenly changed. There arose a clamor for high influence whispered of made no sign now. discovery and punishment of the writer, unequalled But some years after, when it was her interest to in its vehemence and intensity. To the lasting say it, the queen condescended to say, that "she disgrace of the dissenters, they joined the cry. left all that matter to a certain person, and did not They took revenge for their own dulness. That think he would have used Mr. De Foe in such a the writer was De Foe, was now generally manner.' known; and they owed his wit no favor. It had But what was the manner to Mr. De Foe? He troubled them too often before their time. They went to the pillory, as in those after years he went preferred to wait till Sacheverell's bloody flag was to the palace, with the same quiet temper. In hoisted in reality: such a pamphlet, meanwhile, truth, writers and thinkers lived nearer to it then was a scurrilous irreverence to religion and author- than we can well fancy possible now. It had ity, and they would have none of it. A worthy played no ignominious part in the grand age passed colonel of the party said, "he'd undertake to be away. Noble hearts had been tried and tempered hangman, rather than the author should want a in it. Daily had been elevated in it, mental indepass out of the world ;" and a self-denying chair-pendence, manly self-reliance, robust athletic enman of one of the foremost dissenters clubs pro- durance. All from within that has undying worth, fessed such zeal, that if he could find the libeller it had, in those times, but the more plainly exhe would deliver him up without the reward. posed without. The only archbishop that De For government had now offered a reward of fifty Foe ever truly reverenced, was the son of a man, pounds for the apprehension of Daniel De Foe. who, in it, had been tortured and mutilated; and There is no doubt that the moderate chiefs were the saintly character of that prelate was even less disinclined to this; but they were weak at that time. Lord Nottingham had not yet been displaced; there was a tory house of commons, which not even Harley's tact could always manage, and by which the libel had been voted to the hangman; nor had Godolphin's reluctance availed against the On the 29th of July, 1703, there appeared, in wish of the court, that office should be given to twenty-four quarto pages, A Hymn to the Pillory, the member most eminent for opposition to the by Daniel De Foe; and on that day, we are inlate king while he lived, and for insults to his formed by the London Gazette, Daniel De Foe memory. De Foe had little chance; and Notting- stood in the pillory before the Royal Exchange in ham, a sincere bigot, took the task of hunting him Cornhill; on the day following, near the conduit down. The proclamation in the London Gazette in Cheapside; and on the 31st, at Temple-Bar. A described him," a middle-sized, spare man, about large crowd had assembled to provide themselves forty years old, of a brown complexion, and dark-sport; but the pillory they most enjoyed was not brown colored hair, but wears a wig; a hooked of the government's erecting. Unexpectedly they nose, a sharp chin, grey eyes, and a large mole saw the law pilloried, and the ministers of state; near his mouth; owner of the brick and pan-tile the dulness which could not comprehend, and the works near Tilbury Fort, in Essex." But it was malice which on that account would punish, a popunot immediately successful. Warrants then threw into custody the printer and the bookseller; and De Foe concealed himself no longer. He came forth, as he says, to brave the storm. saintly than his father's. A Presbyterian's first thought would be of these things; and De Foe's preparation for the pillory was to fortify his honest dignity by remembrance of them, in the most nervous and pointed verses he had ever written. lar champion. They veered quickly round. Other missiles than were wont to greet a pillory reached De Foe; and shouts of a different temper. His health was drunk with acclamations as he stood there; and nothing harder than a flower was flung at him. "The people were expected to treat me very ill," he said; "but it was not so. On the contrary, they were with me; wished those who had sent me there were placed in my room; and expressed their affections by loud shouts and acclamations when I was taken down." We are told that garlands covered the platform where he stood; and that he saw the Hymn passed from hand to hand, and heard what it calmly said, less calmly repeated, He stood in the Old Bailey dock in July, 1703. Barcourt, who before had carried up the impeachment of Somers, and was afterwards counsel for Sacheverell, prosecuted. "A man without shame," says speaker Onslow, "but very able." It was his doctrine, that he ought to prosecute every man who should assert any power in the people to call their governors to account;-taking this to be a right corollary from the undoubtedly existing law of libel, that no man might publish a writing reflecting on the government, or even upon the capacity and fitness of any one employed in it. The revolution had not altered this law; and it was in effect the direct source of the profligate and most prolific personal libels of the age we are entering on. For Harcourt's policy was found impracticable, and retaliation was substituted for An undeniable witness who was present, (a noted it;—as the denial of all liberty in theory will com-tory libeller of the day, Ned Ward,) frankly ad "Tell them the men that placed him here 66 mits this "lofty Hymn to the wooden-ruff" to have been to the law a counter-cuff: and truly, without whiggish flattery, a plain assault and downright battery." Had not De Foe established his right, then, to stand there "unabashed?" Unabashed by, and unabated in his contempt for, tyranny and dulness, was he not now entitled to return fearless, (not “earless,” O readers of Dunciad!) to his appointed home in Newgate? A home of no unwise experience to the wise observer. A scene of no unromantic aspect to the minute and careful painter. It is a common reproach to the memory of William of Orange, that literature and art found no encouragement in him;| but let us remember that Daniel De Foe and David Teniers acknowledged him for their warmest friend. There is higher art and higher literature within the field selected by both, there is none so exact and true. But the war of politics has not yet released our English Teniers. He has not leisure yet for the more peaceful" art of roguery." In the writings he now rapidly sent forth from Newgate, we think we see something of what we may call the impatient restlessness of martyrdom. He is more eager than was perhaps desirable, to proclaim what he has done, and what he will do. We can fancy, if we may so express it, a sort of reasonable dislike, somewhat unreasonably conceived against him now, by the young men of letters and incipient wits with whom the world was going easily. His utmost address might seem to have some offence in it; his utmost liberality to contain some bigotry; his best offices to society to be rendered of doubtful origin, by what would appear a sort of everlasting pragmaticalness and delight in finding fault. It is natural, all this. We trample upon a man, plunder him, imprison him, strive to make him infamous, and wonder if he is only the more hardened in his persuasion that he has a much better case than ourselves. One of the pirate printers of the day took advantage of the imprisoned writer's popularity to issue the Works of the Author of the True-born Englishman; and thought himself grossly ill-used, because the author retorted with a charge of theft, and a True Collection corrected by Himself. The very portrait he had affixed to this latter book was a new of fence. Here was a large, determined, resolute face. Here was a lordly, full-bottomed wig ;flowing lower than the elbow, and rising higher than the forehead, with amazing amplitude of curl. Here was richly-laced cravat; fine loose flowing cloak; and surly, substantial citizen aspect. He was proud of this portrait, by the way, and complains of that of the pirate volume as no more like himself than Sir Roger L'Estrange was like the dog Touzer. But was this the look of a languishing prisoner? Was this an image of the tyranny complained of? Neither Tutchin of the Observator, nor Leslie of the Rehearsal, could bring himself to think it. So they found some rest from the assailing of each other, in common and prolonged assaults upon De Foe. He did not spare them in return. He wrote satires; he wrote polemics; he wrote politics; he discussed Occasional Conformity with Dissenters, and the grounds of popular right with Highfliers; he wrote a famous account of the Great Storm; he took part in the boldest questions of Scotch and Irish policy; he canvassed with daring freedom the measures of the court, on whose pleasure the opening of his prison-doors depended; he argued with admirable force and wit against a proposed revival of the censorship of the press; he put the claims of authors to be protected in their copyright with irresistible force; and finally he set up his Review. Its plan was curious, and, at that time, new to English literature. It was at first a quarto sheet, somewhat widely printed, published weekly, and sold for a penny. After the fourth number, it was reduced to half a sheet and sold for twopence, in smaller print and with double columns. After the eighth number, it was published twice a week, on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Before the close of the first volume, it sent forth monthly supplements. And at last it appeared on the Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, of every week; and so continued, without intermission, and written solely by De Foe, for nine years. He wrote it in prison and out of prison; in sickness and in health. It did not cease when circumstances called him from England. No official employment determined it; no politic consideration availed to discontinue it. Through all the vicissitudes of men and ministers, from 1704 to 1713; amid all the contentions and the shouts of party, he kept with this homely weapon his singlehanded way, a solitary watchman at the portals of the commonwealth. Remarkable for its rich and various knowledge, its humor, its satire, its downright hearty earnestness, it is a yet more surprising monument of inexhaustible activity and energy. It seems to have been suggested to him, in the first instance, as a resource against the uncertainties of his imprisonment, and their disastrous effect on his trade speculations, (he had lost by this prosecution more than £4000;) and there is no doubt it assisted him in the support of his family for several of these years. But he had no efficient protection against its continued piracy. The thieves counted it by thousands, when worthy Mr. Mathews the publisher could only account by hundreds; and hence the main and most substantial profit its writer derived from all the anxiety and toil it cost him, was expressed in the proud declaration of one of its latest numbers. "I have here espoused an honest interest, and have steadily adhered to it all my days. I never forsook it when it was oppressed; never made gain by it when it was advanced; and, I thank God, it is not in the power of all the courts and parties in Christendom to bid a price high enough to buy me off from it, or make me desert it." The arrangement of its plan was not less origi nal than that of its form. The path it struck out in periodical literature was, in this respect, entirely novel. It classed the minor and the larger morals; it mingled personal and public themes; it put the gravities of life in an entertaining form; and at once discussed the politics, and corrected the vices of the age. We will best indicate the manner in which this was done by naming rapidly the subjects treated in the first volume; besides those of political concern. It condemned the fashionable practice of immoderate drinking; in various ways, ridiculed the not less fashionable habit of swearing; inveighed against the laxity of marital ties; exposed the licentiousness of the stage; discussed, with great clearness and sound knowledge, questions affecting trade and the poor; laughed at the rage for gambling speculations; and waged inveterate war with the barbarous practice of the duel. Its machinery for matters non-political was a socalled Scandalous Club, organized to hear complaints, and entrusted with the power of deciding them. Let us show how it acted. A gentleman would not creep back to the tories. To join with Robert Harley was to do neither of these things. This famous person appears to us to have been the nearest representative of what we might call the practical spirit of the revolution, of any who lived in that age. In one of his casual sayings reported by Pope, we seem to find a clue to his character. Some one had observed of a measure proposed, that the people would never bear it. appears before the club, and complains of his wife. | urer could not yet cross boldly to the whigs, and She is a bad wife; he cannot exactly tell why. There is a long examination, proving nothing; when suddenly a member of the club begs pardon for the question, and asks if his worship was a good husband. His worship, greatly surprised at such a question, is again at a loss to answer. Whereupon, the club pass three resolutions. That most women that are bad wives are made so by bad husbands: That this society will hear no complaints against a virtuous bad wife from a vicious None of us," replied Harley, "know how far good husband: That he that has a bad wife, and the good people of England will bear." All his can't find the reason of it in her, 't is ten to one life he was engaged in attempts upon that probthat he finds it in himself. And the decision lem. If he had thought less of the good people finally is, that the gentleman is to go home, and of England, he would have been a less able, a be a good husband for at least three months; after more daring, and certainly a more successful which, if his wife is still uncured, they will pro- statesman. We do not think he was a trimmer, ceed against her as they shall find cause. In this in the ordinary sense of the word. When he went way, pleas and defences are heard on the various to church, and sent his family to the meetingpoints that present themselves in the subjects house; when he never asked a clergyman to his named; and not seldom with a lively dramatic in- Sunday table without providing a clergyman "of terest. The graver arguments and essays too, another sort" to meet him; we should try to find have an easy, homely vigor; a lightness and a better word for it, if we would not find a worse pleasantry of tone; very different from the ponder- for the revolution. The revolution trimmed beous handling peculiar to the Ridpaths and the Dy-tween two parties. The revolution, to this day, ers, the Tutchins and the Leslies. We open at an is but the grand unsolved experiment of how much essay on trade, which would delight Mr. Cobden the people of England will bear. To call Harley himself. De Foe is arguing against impolitic re- a mere court intriguer, is as preposterous as to strictions. We think to plague the foreigner, he call him a statesman of commanding genius. He says; in reality, we but deprive ourselves. "If had less of mere courtliness than any of his colyou vex me, I'll eat no dinner, said I, when I was leagues. The fashionable French dancing-master a little boy till my mother taught me to be wiser who wondered what the devil the queen should by letting me stay till I was hungry.' have seen in him to make him an earl and lordtreasurer-for he attended him two years, and never taught such a dunce-gives us a lively notion of his homely, bourgeois manners. Petticoat politics are to be charged against him; but to no one who thoroughly knew the queen can it be matter of severe reproach, that he was at the pains to place Abigail Hill about her person. He knew the impending downfall of Marlborough's too imperious wife; and was he to lose a power so plainly within his grasp, and see it turned against him? His success in the bedchamber never shook his superior faith in the agencies of parliament and the press. These two were the levers of the revolution; and they are memorably associated with the government of Robert Harley. : The reader will remember the time when this Review was planned. Ensign Steele was but a lounger in the lobbies of the theatres; Addison had not emerged from his garret in the Haymarket. The details of common life had not yet been invested with the graces of literature; the social and polite moralities were still disregarded in the press; the world knew not the influence of my Lady Betty Modish, and Colonel Ranter still swore at the waiters. Where shall we look for "the first sprightly runnings" of Tattlers and Spectators then, if we have not found them in De Foe's Review? The earlier was indeed the ruder workman; but wit, originality, and knowledge were yet the tools he worked with; and the later "twopenny authors," as Mr. Dennis is pleased to call them, found the way well struck out for their finer and more delicate art. What had been done for the citizen-classes, they were to do for the beauties and the wits. They had watched the experiment, and seen its success. The Review was enormously popular. It was stolen, pirated, hawked about everywhere; and the writer, with few of the advantages, paid all the penalties of success. He complains that his name was made "the hackney title of the times." Hardly a penny or twopenny pamphlet was afterwards cried in the streets to which the scurrilous libeller, or witless dunce, had not forged that popular name. Nor was it without its influence on the course of events which now gradually changed the aspect and the policy of Godolphin's government. De Foe has claimed for himself large share in preparing a way for what were called the "modern whigs;" and the claim was undoubtedly well founded. Nottingham and Rochester had resigned; and the great house of commons tactician was now a member of the government. The seals of the home and war offices had been given to Harley and his friend Henry St. John. The lord-treas As soon as he joined Godolphin, he seems to have turned his thoughts to De Foe. He was not, indeed, the first who had done so. More than one attempt had been already made to capitulate with that potent prisoner. Two lords had gone to him in Newgate! says Oldmixon; in amaze that one lord could find his way to such a place. He says the same thing himself, in the witty narrative at the close of the Consolidator. But they carried conditions with them; and there is a letter in the British Museum, (Addit. MS. 7421,) wherein De Foe writes to Lord Halifax, that he "scorned to come out of Newgate at the price of betraying a dead master." Harley made no conditions: it was not his way. He sent to De Foe because he was a man of letters, and in distress. His message was "by word of mouth;" and to this effect"Pray, ask Mr. De Foe what I can do for him." Nor was the reply less characteristic. prisoner took a piece of paper and wrote the parable of the blind man in the gospel. "I am blind, and yet ask me what thou shalt do for me! My answer is plain in my misery. Lord, that I may receive my sight!" What else could such a man wish for but his liberty! Yet four months passed The before a further communication. It seemed to imply reluctance in a higher quarter. Within four months, however, "her majesty was pleased particularly to enquire into my circumstances, and by my Lord-Treasurer Godolphin to send a considerable supply to my wife and family; and to send to me the prison-money, to pay my fine and the expenses of my discharge. His health was shattered by his long confinement. He took a house at Bury in Suffolk, and lived there a little while retired. But his pen did not rest; nor could he retire from the notorieties that followed him. His name was still hawked about the London streets; and it was reported, and had to be formally denied, that he had escaped from Newgate by a trick. Then came the exciting news that Blenheim was won, France humbled, Europe saved; and De Foe, in verses of no great merit, but which cost him only "three hours to compose, gave public utterance to his joy. Then the dry unlettered lord-treasurer went in search of the most graceful wit among the whigs, to get advice for a regular poet to celebrate the captain-general. Then Halifax brought down Addison from his garret; the Campaign was exchanged for a comfortable government salary; and communications again opened with De Foe. Two letters of this date, from himself to Halifax, have escaped his biographers. In the first he is grateful for that lord's unexpected goodness, in mentioning him to my lord-treasurer; but would be well pleased to wait till Halifax is himself in power. He speaks of a government communication concerning “ paper credit," which he is then handling in his Review. He regrets that some proposal his lordship had sent, exceeding pleasant to me to perform, as well as useful to be done," had been so blundered by the messenger that he could not understand it; and from this we get a glimpse of a person hitherto unnamed in his history-a brother, a stupid fellow. In the second letter, he acknowledges the praise and favors of Lord Halifax; and thus manfully declares the principle on which his own services are offered. "If to be encouraged in giving myself up to that service your lordship is pleased so much to overvalue; if going on with the more cheerfulness in being useful to, and promoting the general peace and interest of this nation; if to the last vigorously opposing a stupid, distracted party, that are for ruining themselves rather that not destroy their neighbors; if this be to merit so much regard, your lordship binds me in the most durable, and to me the most pleasant engagement in the world, because 't is a service that, with my gratitude to your lordship, keeps an exact unison with my reason, my principles, my inclinations, and the duty every man owes to his country, and his posterity." 66 Harley was at this time in daily communication with Halifax, and doubtless saw these letters. But he managed all things warily. He had not appeared in De Foe's affairs since he effected his release; and that release he threw upon the queen. In the same temper he sent to him now. The queen, he said, had need of his assistance. He offered him no employment to fetter his future engagements. He knew that in the last of his publications (the Consolidator, a prose satire remarkable for the hints it threw out to Gulliver) he had laughed at Addison for refusing to write the Campaign "till he had £200 a year secured to him ;" an allusion never forgiven. He sent for him to London; told him the queen "had the goodness to think of taking him into her service:" and did what the whigs were vainly endeavoring to do for an Irish priest who had written the most masterly satire since the days of Rabelais-took him to court to kiss hands. We see in all this but the truth of the character we would assign to Harley. On grounds independent of either party, except so far as reason, principles, inclination, and duty to his country" should prompt, he had here enlisted this powerful, homely, and popular writer in the service of the government of the revolution. Compared with Harley, we cannot but think the old whigs, with every honest inclination, little better than bunglers in matters of this kind. It is true that not even Harley could carry the Vicar of Laracor to the palace;-but he could carry him in his coach to country ale-houses; he could play games of counting poultry on the road, or "who should first see a cat or an old woman;" he could loll back on his seat with a broad "Temple" jest ; or he could call and be called Jonathan and Harley;-and the old whigs were much too chary of these things. So they had lost Prior, and were losing Parnell and Swift; and he who had compared Lord Somers to Aristides, was soon to talk of him as little better than a rascal. We next see De Foe in the house of Mr. Secretary Harley. He has been named to execute a secret commission in the public service, which requires a brief absence on the continent. He is making preparations for his departure; proposing to travel as Mr. Christopher Hurt; giving Harley advice for a large scheme of secret intelligence; and discussing with him a proposed poetical satire (afterwards published as the Diet of Poland) against the high church faction. In a subsequent farewell letter he adverts to these things; and, after naming some matters of public feeling, in which one of the minister's tory associates was awkwardly involved, characteristically closes with an opinion, that it was needful Harley should know in this, as well as anything else, what the people say. The foreign service was one of danger. "I ran as much danger of my life as a grenadier upon the counterscarp.' But it was discharged successfully; and, in consideration of the risk, the government offered him what seems to have been a small sinecure. He took it as a debt; and at a later period, when opposed to the reigning ministry, complains that large arrears were then unpaid. On his return he had found the tory house of commons dissolved, and the new elections in progress. He threw himself into the contest with characteristic ardor. He wrote; he canvassed; he voted; he journeyed throughout the country on horseback, he tells us, more than eleven hundred miles; and, in addresses to electors everywhere, still counselled the necessity of laying aside party prejudices, of burying former animosities, and of meeting their once tory ministers at least half-way. He found many arguments on his road, he adds. He found people of all opinions, as well churchmen as dissenters living in Christian neighborhood; and he had very often the honor, "with small difficulty, of convincing gentlemen over a bottle of wine, that the author of the Review was really no monster, but a conversable, social creature." His Essays, meanwhile, written in the progress of this journeying were admirable. They were read in every coffee-house and club; often they were stolen from these houses by highfliers, that they might not be read; they were quoted on every popular |