remarks upon the
evils of an attitude which fails to look upon events from a larger
aspect than their immediate environment. But his history is intended
less to illustrate the working of principle than to collect cases worthy
of citation. Time and space do not exist as categories; he is as content
with a Roman anecdote as with a Stuart illustration. He is willing,
indeed, to look for the causes of the Revolution as far back as the
reign of James I; though he shows his lack of true perception when he
ascribes the true inwardness of the Reformation to the greed of the
monarch for the spoils of the clergy. At bottom what mainly impresses
him is the immense influence of personal accident upon events.
Intrigue, a sudden dislike, some backstairs piece of gossip, here is the
real root of great changes. And when he expresses a "thorough contempt"
for the kind of work scholars such as Scaliger and Petavius had
achieved, he shows his entire ignorance of the method whereby alone a
knowledge of general principle can be attained.

A clear vision, of course, he has, and he was not beguiled by high
notions of prerogative or the like. The divine right of kings is too
stupid to be worth the trouble of refutation; all that makes a king
important is the authority he exerts. So, too, with the Church; for
Bolingbroke, as a professed deist, has no trouble with such matters as
the apostolic succession. He makes great show of his love of liberty,
which is the true end of government; and we are informed with a vast
solemnity of the "perpetual danger" in which it always stands. So that
the chief end of patriotism is its maintenance; though we are never told
what liberty is, nor how it is to be maintained. The social compact
seems to win his approbation and we learn that the secret of the
British constitution is the balance of powers and their mutual
independency. But what the powers are, and how their independence is
preserved we do not learn, save by an insistence that the safety of
Europe is to be found in playing off the ambitions of France and Austria
against each other; an analogy the rejection of which has been the
secret of English constitutional success. We learn of the evil of
standing armies and the danger of Septennial Parliaments. We are told
that parties are mainly moved by the prospect of enjoying office and
vast patronage; and a great enough show is made of his hatred for
corruption as to convince at least some critics of distinct