lexities._]

[Sidenote: _Failures and Inconsistencies._]

He is among the most dazzling personalities in English history, and the
most enigmatical. Not an action ascribed to him, not a plan he is
reputed to have conceived, not a date in his multifarious career, but is
matter of controversy. In view of the state of the national records in
the last century, it is scarcely strange that Gibbon himself should,
after selecting him for a theme, have recoiled from the task of
marshalling the chaos of his 'obscure' deeds, a 'fame confined to the
narrow limits of our language and our island,' and 'a fund of materials
not yet properly manufactured.' Posterity and his contemporaries have
equally been unable to agree on his virtues and his vices, the nature of
his motives, the spelling of his name, and the amount of his genius. No
man was ever less reticent about himself; and his confessions and
apologies deepen the confusion. He had a poet's inspiration; and his
title to most of the verses ascribed to him is contested. He was one of
the creators of modern English prose; and his disquisitions have for two
centuries ceased to be read. He and Bacon are coupled by Dugald Stewart
as eminent beyond their age for their emancipation from the fetters of
the Schoolmen, their originality, and the enlargement of their
scientific conceptions; and a single phrase, 'the fundamental laws of
human knowledge,' is the only philosophical idea connected with him. His
name is entered, rightly, in the first rank of discoverers, navigators,
and planters, on account of two countries which he neither found nor
permanently colonized. He was a great admiral, who commanded in chief on
one expedition alone, and that miserably failed. He had in him the
making of a great soldier, though his exploits are lost in the dreary
darkness of intestine French and Irish savageries. He was a master of
policy, and his loftiest office was that of Captain of the Guard. None
could be kinder, or more chivalrously generous, and he practised with
complacency in Munster treachery and cruelty which he abhorred in a
Spaniard of Trinidad. He had the subtlest brain, and became the
yokefellow of a Cobham. He thirsted after Court favour, and wealth, and
died attainted and landless. He longed to scour the world for
adventures, and spent a fourth part of his manhood in a gaol. He laid
the foundation of a married life characterized by an unbroken tenor of
romantic trust and devotion, by do