to look straight
before him and make up his mind. He often led astray those who acted
with him merely because his own confusion of intellect and want of
defined purpose were leading himself astray. Perhaps the most
dignified passage in his life was that which showed him calmly awaiting
the worst in London, when men like Bolingbroke and Ormond had chosen to
seek safety in flight. Yet even the course which he took in this
instance seems to have been rather the result of indecision than of
independent self-sufficing courage and resolve. He does not appear to
have been able to decide upon anything until the time had passed when
movement of any kind would have availed, and so he remained where he
was. Many a man has gained credit for courage, and has seemed to
surround himself with dignity, because at a moment of alarm, when
others did this or that, he was unable quite to make up his mind as to
what he ought to do, and so did nothing, and let the world go by.

[Sidenote: 1715--Sir Henry St. John]

On September 17, Norroy, King at Arms, came solemnly down to the House
of Lords and razed the names of Ormond and of Bolingbroke from the roll
of peers. Bolingbroke had some consolation of a sham kind. He had
wished and schemed to be Earl of Bolingbroke before his fall, and now
his new king, James of St. Germains, had given him the patent of
enhanced nobility. If he ceased to be a viscount in the eyes of
English peers and of English heralds, he was still an earl in the
Pretender's court. Bolingbroke had too keen a sense of humor not to be
painfully aware of the irony of the situation. Nor was he likely to
find much satisfaction in the peerage {115} which the Government had
just conferred upon his father, Sir Henry St. John, by creating him
Baron of Battersea and Viscount St. John. Sir Henry St. John was an
idle, careless _roue_, a haunter of St. James's coffee-houses, living
in the manner and in the memories of the Restoration, listlessly
indifferent to all parties, leaning, perhaps, a little to the Whigs.
He had no manner of sympathy with his son or appreciation of his
genius. When the son was made a peer the father only said, "Well,
Harry, I thought thee would be hanged, but now I see thee wilt be
beheaded." The father himself was once very near being hanged. In his
wild youth he had killed a man in a quarrel, and was tried for murder
and condemned to death, and then pardoned by the King, Charles II., in
considera