not a Catholic. He was at home the partly
republican magistrate of what had once been a purely republican
experiment, and among the cleaner if colder ideals of the seventeenth
century. George was when he was at home pretty much what the King of
the Cannibal Islands was when he was at home--a savage personal ruler
scarcely logical enough to be called a despot. William was a man of
acute if narrow intelligence; George was a man of no intelligence. Above
all, touching the immediate effect produced, William was married to a
Stuart, and ascended the throne hand-in-hand with a Stuart; he was a
familiar figure, and already a part of our royal family. With George
there entered England something that had scarcely been seen there
before; something hardly mentioned in mediaeval or Renascence writing,
except as one mentions a Hottentot--the barbarian from beyond the Rhine.

The reign of Queen Anne, which covers the period between these two
foreign kings, is therefore the true time of transition. It is the
bridge between the time when the aristocrats were at least weak enough
to call in a strong man to help them, and the time when they were strong
enough deliberately to call in a weak man who would allow them to help
themselves. To symbolize is always to simplify, and to simplify too
much; but the whole may be well symbolized as the struggle of two great
figures, both gentlemen and men of genius, both courageous and clear
about their own aims, and in everything else a violent contrast at every
point. One of them was Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke; the other was
John Churchill, the famous and infamous Duke of Marlborough. The story
of Churchill is primarily the story of the Revolution and how it
succeeded; the story of Bolingbroke is the story of the
Counter-Revolution and how it failed.

Churchill is a type of the extraordinary time in this, that he combines
the presence of glory with the absence of honour. When the new
aristocracy had become normal to the nation, in the next few
generations, it produced personal types not only of aristocracy but of
chivalry. The Revolution reduced us to a country wholly governed by
gentlemen; the popular universities and schools of the Middle Ages, like
their guilds and abbeys, had been seized and turned into what they
are--factories of gentlemen, when they are not merely factories of
snobs. It is hard now to realize that what we call the Public Schools
were once undoubtedly public. By the Revol