the volcano; and that the ancient
devastation could hardly be recognised, except for an occasional dark
mass, which, not yet decomposed, frowns here and there over the
surrounding fertility. Something like this was true of St. John; he
believed his ambition extinct, and attempted to gather round its ruins
all the beauties and splendour of contented wisdom; but his nature was
still ungovernably fierce; and to the last, his passions lowered angrily
on the quiet scenes of his literary retirement.

There is no clue to his character, except in supposing him to have been
under the influence of ennui, which was perpetually terrifying him into
the grossest contradictions. He could not be said to have had any
principles, or to have belonged to any party; and to whatever party he
rallied, he was sure to become utterly faithless. He was not less false
to the Pretender than to the King, to Ormond than to Walpole. He was
false to the tories and false to the whigs; he was false to his country,
for he attempted to involve her in civil war; and false to his God, for
he combated religion. He was not swayed by a passion for glory, for he
did not pursue it steadily,--nor by a passion for power, for he
quarrelled with the only man by whose aid he could have maintained it.
He was rather driven to and fro by a wild restlessness, which led him
into gross contradictions "for his sins." Nor was his falsehood without
its punishment. What could be more pitifully degrading, than for one who
had been a successful British minister of state, and had displayed in
the face of Europe his capacity for business and his powers of
eloquence, to have finally stooped to accept a seat in the Pretender's
cabinet, where pimps and prostitutes were the prime agents and
counsellors?

There exists a very pleasant letter from Pope, giving an account of
Bolingbroke's rural occupations, during his country life in England,
after the reversal of his attainder. He insisted on being a farmer; and
to prove himself so, hired a painter to fill the walls of his parlour
with rude pictures of the implements of husbandry. The poet describes
him between two haycocks, watching the clouds with all the apparent
anxiety of a husbandman; but to us it seems, that his mind was at that
time no more in the skies than when he quoted Anaxagoras, and declared
heaven to be the wise man's home. His heart clung to earth, and to
earthly strife; and his uneasiness must at last have become deplor