pportable to the more delicately organized mind of
Halifax, had a strong fascination. The different characters of the two
statesmen were legible in their faces. The brow, the eye, and the mouth
of Halifax indicated a powerful intellect and an exquisite sense of the
ludicrous; but the expression was that of a sceptic, of a voluptuary,
of a man not likely to venture his all on a single hazard, or to be a
martyr in any cause. To those who are acquainted with his countenance
it will not seem wonderful that the writer in whom he most delighted
was Montaigne. [418] Danby was a skeleton; and his meagre and wrinkled,
though handsome and noble, face strongly expressed both the keenness
of his parts and the restlessness of his ambition. Already he had once
risen from obscurity to the height of power. He had then fallen headlong
from his elevation. His life had been in danger. He had passed years in
a prison. He was now free: but this did not content him: he wished to
be again great. Attached as he was to the Anglican Church, hostile as he
was to the French ascendency, he could not hope to be great in a court
swarming with Jesuits and obsequious to the House of Bourbon. But, if he
bore a chief part in a revolution which should confound all the schemes
of the Papists, which should put an end to the long vassalage of
England, and which should transfer the regal power to an illustrious
pair whom he had united, he might emerge from his eclipse with new
splendour. The Whigs, whose animosity had nine years before driven
him from office, would, on his auspicious reappearance, join their
acclamations to the acclamations of his old friends the Cavaliers.
Already there had been a complete reconciliation between him and one of
the most distinguished of those who had formerly been managers of his
impeachment, the Earl of Devonshire. The two noblemen had met at
a village in the Peak, and had exchanged assurances of good will.
Devonshire had frankly owned that the Whigs had been guilty of a great
injustice, and had declared that they were now convinced of their error.
Danby, on his side, had also recantations to make. He had once held,
or pretended to hold, the doctrine of passive obedience in the largest
sense. Under his administration and with his sanction, a law had
been proposed which, if it had been passed, would have excluded from
Parliament and office all who refused to declare on oath that
they thought resistance in every case unlawful. B