resist the arts of a noble, eloquent and wealthy
flatterer, who united juvenile vivacity to profound art and long
experience of the gay world. It mattered not what the novice preferred,
gallantry or field sports, the dicebox or the bottle. Wharton soon found
out the master passion, offered sympathy, advice and assistance, and,
while seeming to be only the minister of his disciple's pleasures, made
sure of his disciple's vote.

The party to whose interests Wharton, with such spirit and constancy,
devoted his time, his fortune, his talents, his very vices, judged
him, as was natural, far too leniently. He was widely known by the
very undeserved appellation of Honest Tom. Some pious men, Burnet, for
example, and Addison, averted their eyes from the scandal which he gave,
and spoke of him, not indeed with esteem, yet with goodwill. A most
ingenious and accomplished Whig, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, author
of the Characteristics, described Wharton as the most mysterious of
human beings, as a strange compound of best and worst, of private
depravity and public virtue, and owned himself unable to understand how
a man utterly without principle in every thing but politics should in
politics be as true as steel. But that which, in the judgment of one
faction, more than half redeemed all Wharton's faults, seemed to the
other faction to aggravate them all. The opinion which the Tories
entertained of him is expressed in a single line written after his death
by the ablest man of that party; "He was the most universal villain that
ever I knew." [480] Wharton's political adversaries thirsted for
his blood, and repeatedly tried to shed it. Had he not been a man of
imperturbable temper, dauntless courage and consummate skill in fence,
his life would have been a short one. But neither anger nor danger ever
deprived him of his presence of mind; he was an incomparable swordsman;
and he had a peculiar way of disarming opponents which moved the envy of
all the duellists of his time. His friends said that he had never given
a challenge, that he had never refused one, that he had never taken a
life, and yet that he had never fought without having his antagonist's
life at his mercy. [481]

The four men who have been described resembled each other so little that
it may be thought strange that they should ever have been able to act
in concert. They did, however, act in the closest concert during many
years. They more than once rose and more th