House of Lords. His conversation
overflowed with thought, fancy, and wit. His political tracts well
deserve to be studied for their literary merit, and fully entitle him
to a place among English classics. To the weight derived from talents so
great and various he united all the influence which belongs to rank and
ample possessions. Yet he was less successful in politics than many who
enjoyed smaller advantages. Indeed, those intellectual peculiarities
which make his writings valuable frequently impeded him in the contests
of active life. For he always saw passing events, not in the point of
view in which they commonly appear to one who bears a part in them,
but in the point of view in which, after the lapse of many years, they
appear to the philosophic historian. With such a turn of mind he
could not long continue to act cordially with any body of men. All the
prejudices, all the exaggerations, of both the great parties in the
state moved his scorn. He despised the mean arts and unreasonable
clamours of demagogues. He despised still more the doctrines of divine
right and passive obedience. He sneered impartially at the bigotry of
the Churchman and at the bigotry of the Puritan. He was equally unable
to comprehend how any man should object to Saints' days and surplices,
and how any man should persecute any other man for objecting to them. In
temper he was what, in our time, is called a Conservative: in theory
he was a Republican. Even when his dread of anarchy and his disdain
for vulgar delusions led him to side for a time with the defenders of
arbitrary power, his intellect was always with Locke and Milton. Indeed,
his jests upon hereditary monarchy were sometimes such as would have
better become a member of the Calf's Head Club than a Privy Councillor
of the Stuarts. In religion he was so far from being a zealot that
he was called by the uncharitable an atheist: but this imputation he
vehemently repelled; and in truth, though he sometimes gave scandal by
the way in which he exerted his rare powers both of reasoning and
of ridicule on serious subjects, he seems to have been by no means
unsusceptible of religious impressions.

He was the chief of those politicians whom the two great parties
contemptuously called Trimmers. Instead of quarrelling with this
nickname, he assumed it as a title of honour, and vindicated, with great
vivacity, the dignity of the appellation. Everything good, he said,
trims between extremes. The