kill and subtlety of his brother Pelham;
but there were so many occasions on which he must have trusted to
himself alone, that it may well be doubted, whether to be, constantly
successful, he must not have been singularly skilful, and that the
personal dexterity of the minister was the true secret of his prolonged
power.

We now come to Walpole's summary of the career of the two most
celebrated men of his early life--his father and Bolingbroke.

Sir Robert Walpole and Lord Bolingbroke had begun, as rivals at school,
lived a life of competition, and died much in the same manner, "provoked
at being killed by empirics, but with the same difference in their
manner of dying as had appeared in the temper of their lives,--the first
with a calmness which was habitual philosophy, the other with a rage
which his affected philosophy could not disguise. The one had seen his
early ambition dashed with imprisonment, from which he had shot into the
sphere of his rival. The other was exiled, recalled, and ruined. Walpole
rose gradually to the height of power, maintained it by his single
talents against Bolingbroke, assisted by all the considerable men of
England; and when driven from it at last, resigned it without a stain or
a censure; retiring to private life without an attempt to re-establish
himself, and almost without a regret for what he had lost."

Though this was the tribute of a son to a father, it is, in all its
essentials, the tribute of truth; for Walpole was, beyond all doubt, a
man of great administrative abilities, remarkably temperate in the use
of power, and, though violently assailed both within and without the
house, neither insolent in the one instance, nor vindictive in the
other. It was equally beyond a doubt, that to him was in a great degree
owing the establishment of the Hanover succession. The peaceful
extinction of Jacobitism, whose success would have been the renewal of
despotism and popery; and that system of finance and nurture of the
national resources, which prepared the country for the signal triumphs
of the reign, were the work of Walpole.

Bolingbroke, with talents of the highest brilliancy, wanted that
strength of judgment without which the most brilliant talents are only
dangerous to their possessor. After tasting of power, only to feel the
bitterness of disappointment--after rising to the height of ambition,
only to be cast into the lowest depths of disgrace, after being driven
into exile, and