speaker and unscrupulous intriguer, as their head;
they were reinforced by a band of younger Whigs--the "Boys," as Walpole
named them--whose temper revolted alike against the inaction and
cynicism of his policy, and whose fiery spokesman was a young cornet of
horse, William Pitt; and they rallied to these the fragment of the Tory
party which still took part in politics, a fragment inconsiderable in
numbers but of far greater weight as representing a large part of the
nation, and which was guided for a while by the virulent ability of
Bolingbroke, whom Walpole had suffered to return from exile, but to whom
he had refused the restoration of his seat in the House of Lords. Inside
Parliament indeed the invectives of the "Patriots" fell dead before
Walpole's majorities and his good-humoured contempt; so far were their
attacks from shaking his power that Bolingbroke abandoned the struggle
in despair to return again into exile, while Pulteney with his party
could only take refuge in a silly secession from Parliament. But on the
nation at large their speeches and pamphlets, with the brilliant
sarcasms of their literary allies, such as Pope or Johnson, did more
effective work. Unjust indeed as their outcry was, the growing response
to it told that the political inactivity of the country was drawing to
an end. It was the very success of Walpole's policy which was to bring
about his downfall; for it was the gradual closing of the chasm which
had all but broken England into two warring peoples that allowed the
political energy of the country to return to its natural channels and to
give a new vehemence to political strife. Vague too and hollow as much
of the "high talk" of the Patriots was, it showed that the age of
political cynicism, of that unbelief in high sentiment and noble
aspirations which had followed on the crash of Puritanism, was drawing
to an end. Rant about ministerial corruption would have fallen flat on
the public ear had not new moral forces, a new sense of social virtue, a
new sense of religion been stirring, however blindly, in the minds of
Englishmen.

[Sidenote: The Methodists.]

The stir showed itself markedly in a religious revival which dates from
the later years of Walpole's ministry; and which began in a small knot
of Oxford students, whose revolt against the religious deadness of their
times expressed itself in ascetic observances, an enthusiastic devotion,
and a methodical regularity of life which gaine