d Harley, younger brother of
Robert. A copy of these memoirs is among the Mackintosh MSS.]

[Footnote 483: The only writer who has praised Harley's oratory, as far
as I remember, is Mackay, who calls him eloquent. Swift scribbled in the
margin, "A great lie." And certainly Swift was inclined to do more than
justice to Harley. "That lord," said Pope, "talked of business in so
confused a manner that you did not know what he was about; and every
thing he went to tell you was in the epic way; for he always began in
the middle."--Spence's Anecdotes.]

[Footnote 484: "He used," said Pope, "to send trifling verses from Court
to the Scriblerus Club almost every day, and would come and talk idly
with them almost every night even when his all was at stake." Some
specimens of Harley's poetry are in print. The best, I think, is a
stanza which he made on his own fall in 1714; and bad is the best.

"To serve with love,
And shed your blood,
Approved is above;
But here below
The examples show
'Tis fatal to be good."]

[Footnote 485: The character of Harley is to be collected from
innumerable panegyrics and lampoons; from the works and the private
correspondence of Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot, Prior and Bolingbroke, and
from multitudes of such works as Ox and Bull, the High German Doctor,
and The History of Robert Powell the Puppet Showman.]

[Footnote 486: In a letter dated Sept. 12. 1709 a short time before he
was brought into power on the shoulders of the High Church mob, he says:
"My soul has been among Lyons, even the sons of men, whose teeth are
spears and arrows, and their tongues sharp swords. But I learn how good
it is to wait on the Lord, and to possess one's soul in peace." The
letter was to Carstairs. I doubt whether Harley would have canted thus
if he had been writing to Atterbury.]

[Footnote 487: The anomalous position which Harley and Foley at this
time occupied is noticed in the Dialogue between a Whig and a Tory,
1693. "Your great P. Fo-y," says the Tory, "turns cadet and carries arms
under the General of the West Saxons. The two Har-ys, father and son,
are engineers under the late Lieutenant of the Ordnance, and bomb any
bill which he hath once resolv'd to reduce to ashes." Seymour is the
General of the West Saxons. Musgrave had been Lieutenant of the Ordnance
in the reign of Charles the Second.]

[Footnote 488: Lords' and Commons' Journals, Nov. 7. 1693.]

[Footnote 489: Commons' J