an once fell together. But
their union lasted till it was dissolved by death. Little as some of
them may have deserved esteem, none of them can be accused of having
been false to his brethren of the Junto.

While the great body of the Whigs was, under these able chiefs, arraying
itself in order resembling that of a regular army, the Tories were in a
state of an ill drilled and ill officered militia. They were numerous;
and they were zealous; but they can hardly be said to have had, at this
time, any chief in the House of Commons. The name of Seymour had once
been great among them, and had not quite lost its influence. But,
since he had been at the Board of Treasury, he had disgusted them
by vehemently defending all that he had himself, when out of place,
vehemently attacked. They had once looked up to the Speaker, Trevor; but
his greediness, impudence and venality were now so notorious that all
respectable gentlemen, of all shades of opinion, were ashamed to see him
in the chair. Of the old Tory members Sir Christopher Musgrave alone had
much weight. Indeed the real leaders of the party were two or three men
bred in principles diametrically opposed to Toryism, men who had carried
Whiggism to the verge of republicanism, and who had been considered not
merely as Low Churchmen, but as more than half Presbyterians. Of these
men the most eminent were two great Herefordshire squires, Robert Harley
and Paul Foley.

The space which Robert Harley fills in the history of three reigns,
his elevation, his fall, the influence which, at a great crisis, he
exercised on the politics of all Europe, the close intimacy in which
he lived with some of the greatest wits and poets of his time, and the
frequent recurrence of his name in the works of Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot,
and Prior, must always make him an object of interest. Yet the man
himself was of all men the least interesting. There is indeed a
whimsical contrast between the very ordinary qualities of his mind and
the very extraordinary vicissitudes of his fortune.

He was the heir of a Puritan family. His father, Sir Edward Harley,
had been conspicuous among the patriots of the Long parliament, had
commanded a regiment under Essex, had, after the Restoration, been an
active opponent of the Court, had supported the Exclusion Bill, had
harboured dissenting preachers, had frequented meetinghouses, and had
made himself so obnoxious to the ruling powers that at the time of the
Western In