lvinistic divines. The boy's first
years were past amidst Geneva bands, heads of lank hair, upturned eyes,
nasal psalmody, and sermons three hours long. Plays and poems, hunting
and dancing, were proscribed by the austere discipline of his saintly
family. The fruits of this education became visible, when, from the
sullen mansion of Puritan parents, the hotblooded, quickwitted young
patrician emerged into the gay and voluptuous London of the Restoration.
The most dissolute cavaliers stood aghast at the dissoluteness of the
emancipated precisian. He early acquired and retained to the last the
reputation of being the greatest rake in England. Of wine indeed he
never became the slave; and he used it chiefly for the purpose of making
himself the master of his associates. But to the end of his long life
the wives and daughters of his nearest friends were not safe from his
licentious plots. The ribaldry of his conversation moved astonishment
even in that age. To the religion of his country he offered, in the mere
wantonness of impiety, insults too foul to be described. His mendacity
and his effrontery passed into proverbs. Of all the liars of his time he
was the most deliberate, the most inventive and the most circumstantial.
What shame meant he did not seem to understand. No reproaches, even when
pointed and barbed with the sharpest wit, appeared to give him pain.
Great satirists, animated by a deadly personal aversion, exhausted
all their strength in attacks upon him. They assailed him with keen
invective; they assailed him with still keener irony; but they found
that neither invective nor irony could move him to any thing but an
unforced smile and a goodhumoured curse; and they at length threw down
the lash, acknowledging that it was impossible to make him feel. That,
with such vices, he should have played a great part in life, should have
carried numerous elections against the most formidable opposition by his
personal popularity, should have had a large following in Parliament,
should have risen to the highest offices of the State, seems
extraordinary. But he lived in times when faction was almost a madness;
and he possessed in an eminent degree the qualities of the leader of
a faction. There was a single tie which he respected. The falsest
of mankind in all relations but one, he was the truest of Whigs. The
religious tenets of his family he had early renounced with contempt;
but to the politics of his family he stedfastly