successive Parliaments. Shrewsbury, who was now in
high favor, had been actively concerned in its promotion. It was a
question of compromise altogether, on which politicians were entitled
to form the strongest opinions. No doubt the enemies of the Tory party
had ample ground for condemning and denouncing the Peace. But the part
which a statesman had taken in bringing about the Peace could not,
according to our modern ideas, form any just ground of ministerial
impeachment. Much more reasonably might the statesmen of a later day
have been impeached who, by their blundering and obstinacy, brought
about the armed resistance and the final independence of the North
American colonies. It is curious, in our eyes, to find Oxford
defending his conduct on the ground that he had simply obeyed the
positive orders of his sovereign. The minister would run more risk of
impeachment, in our days, who declared that he had acted in some great
public crisis simply in obedience to his sovereign's orders, than if he
were to stand accountable for the greatest errors, the grossest
blunders, committed on the judgment and on the responsibility of
himself and his colleagues.

Oxford was committed to the Tower, whither he went escorted by an
immense popular procession of his admirers, who cheered vociferously
for him and for High-Church together. He may now be said to drop out
of our history altogether. He was destined to linger in long
confinement, almost like one forgotten by friends and enemies. We
shall have to tell afterwards how he petitioned for a trial, and was
brought to trial, and in what fashion he came to be acquitted by his
peers. The remainder of his life he passed in happy quietude among his
books and curious manuscripts; the books and manuscripts which formed
the original stock of the Harleian Library, afterwards completed by his
son. Harley lived until 1724, and was not an old man even then--only
sixty-three. It is not necessary that in this work we should concern
ourselves much more about him. Despite all the {114} praises of his
friends, some of them men of the highest intellectual gifts, like Swift
and Pope, there does not seem to have been any great quality,
intellectual or moral, in Harley. He had a narrow and feeble mind; he
was incapable of taking a large view of anything; he was selfish and
deceitful; although it has to be said that sometimes that which men
called deceit in him was but a lack of the capacity