ey's speech against occasional conformity. He headed the inquiry
into the danger of the Church. In 1706 he proposed and negotiated
the Union with Scotland; and when the Elector of Hanover received the
Garter, after the Act had passed for securing the Protestant Succession,
he was appointed to carry the ensigns of the Order to the Electoral
Court. He sat as one of the judges of Sacheverell, but voted for a mild
sentence. Being now no longer in favour, he contrived to obtain a writ
for summoning the Electoral Prince to Parliament as Duke of Cambridge.

At the Queen's death he was appointed one of the regents; and at the
accession of George I. was made Earl of Halifax, Knight of the Garter,
and First Commissioner of the Treasury, with a grant to his nephew of
the reversion of the Auditorship of the Exchequer. More was not to be
had, and this he kept but a little while; for on the 19th of May, 1715,
he died of an inflammation of his lungs.

Of him, who from a poet became a patron of poets, it will be readily
believed that the works would not miss of celebration. Addison began
to praise him early, and was followed or accompanied by other poets;
perhaps by almost all, except Swift and Pope, who forbore to flatter
him in his life, and after his death spoke of him--Swift with slight
censure, and Pope, in the character of Bufo, with acrimonious contempt.

He was, as Pope says, "fed with dedications;" for Tickell affirms that
no dedication was unrewarded. To charge all unmerited praise with the
guilt of flattery, and to suppose that the encomiast always knows and
feels the falsehoods of his assertions, is surely to discover great
ignorance of human nature and human life. In determinations depending
not on rules, but on experience and comparison, judgment is always in
some degree subject to affection. Very near to admiration is the wish to
admire.

Every man willingly gives value to the praise which he receives,
and considers the sentence passed in his favour as the sentence of
discernment. We admire in a friend that understanding that selected
us for confidence; we admire more, in a patron, that judgment which,
instead of scattering bounty indiscriminately, directed it to us; and,
if the patron be an author, those performances which gratitude forbids
us to blame, affection will easily dispose us to exalt.

To these prejudices, hardly culpable, interest adds a power always
operating, though not always, because not willingly, p