and welfare of their country that determined these gentlemen to
withdraw has now brought them hither once more, to give their advice
and assistance in those measures which they then pointed out as the
only means of asserting and retrieving them." Walpole's reply was a
little ungracious. It was, in effect, that he thought the country
could have done very well without the services of the honorable
members; that they never would have been missed; and that the nation
was generally wide-awake to the fact that the many useful and popular
measures passed towards the close of the last session owed their
passing to the happy absence from Parliament of Pulteney and his
friends. One might well excuse Walpole if he became sometimes a little
impatient of the attitudinizing and the vaporing of the Patriots.

[Sidenote: 1739-1740--Death of Wyndham]

One of the Patriots was not long to trouble Walpole. On July 17, 1740,
Sir William Wyndham died. Wyndham was a man of honor and a man of
intellect. We have already in this history described his abilities and
his character, his political purity, his personal consistency. He had
always been in poor health; his incessant parliamentary work certainly
could not have tended to improve his physical condition; and he was but
fifty-three years old when he died. Had he lived yet a little longer
he must have taken high office in a new administration, and he might
have proved himself a statesman as well as a party leader and a
parliamentary orator. Perhaps, on the whole, it is better for his fame
that he should have been spared the test. It proved too much for
Carteret. We may give Bolingbroke credit for sincerity when he poured
out, in letter after letter, his lament for Wyndham's death. There is
something, however, characteristic of the age and the man in
Bolingbroke's instant assumption that Walpole must regard the death as
a fine stroke of good-luck for himself. "What a star has our
Minister," Bolingbroke wrote to a friend--"Wyndham dead!" It seems
strange {180} that Bolingbroke should not even then have been able to
see that the star of the great minister was about to set. The death of
Wyndham brought Walpole no profit; gave him no security. But Wyndham's
premature end withdrew a picturesque and a chivalric figure from the
life of the House of Commons. He was one of the few, the very few,
really unselfish and high-minded men who then occupied a prominent
position in Parliament.