when Henry St. John seconded his third nomination. And posterity itself had cause to be grateful to him, when, employing for once this influence in its service, he joined Tory and Whig in a common demand for the best securities of the Act of Settlement. It was not genius, it was not eloquence, it was not statesmanship, that had given Harley this extraordinary power. It was House of Commons tact. It was a thing born of the Revolution, and of which the aim and tendency, through whatever immediate effects, was to strengthen and advance it in the end. For it rested on the largest principles, even while it appealed to the meanest passions.

There was something very striking in the notion of De Foe, to bring it suddenly face to face with those higher principles; and this he did in his Kentish Petition and Legion Memorial. In all the histories which relate the Tory impeachment of William's four Whig lords, will be found that counter-impeachment of the House of Commons itself, preferred in the name of the entire population of England, and comprising fifteen articles of treason against their authority. It was creating a People, it is true, before the people existed; but it was done with the characteristic reality of genius, and had a startling effect. As Harley passed into the house, a man, muffled in a cloak, placed the Memorial in his hands. The Speaker

1702.]

SWIFT'S WHIG PAMPHLET.

61

knew De Foe's person, and is said by the latter to have recognised him; but he kept his counsel.

No one has doubted, that in the excitement of the debates that followed, the Whigs and William recovered much lost ground; and the coffee-houses began to talk mightily of a pamphlet, written by Temple's quondam secretary, now the Reverend Jonathan Swift, parish priest and vicar of Laracor, wherein Lord Portland figured as Phocion, Lord Oxford as Themistocles, Lord Halifax as Pericles, and Lord Somers as Aristides. The subsequent declaration of war against France still further cheered and consoled the King. He sent for De Foe, received from him a scheme for opening new "channels of trade," in connection with the war, and assigned to him a main part in its execution.* He felt that he ruled at last, and was probably never so reconciled to his adopted kingdom. But, in the midst of grand désigns and hopes, he fell from his horse in hunting, sickened for a month, and died.

*The drift of this scheme was for directing such operations against the Spanish possessions in the West Indies as might open new channels of trade, and render the war self-supporting. Writing about it some years later, De Foe gives the following account of it:---"I gave you an instance of a proposal which I had the honour to lay before his late majesty, at the beginning of the last war, for the sending a strong fleet to the Havannah, to seize that part of the island in which it is situated, and from thence

There are many Mock Mourners at royal deaths, and, in a poem with that title, De Foe would have saved his hero's memory from them. He claimed for him nobler homage than such tributes raise, "to damn their former follies by their praise." He told what these mourners were, while yet their living King appeared, "and what they knew they merited, they feared." He described what has since become matter of history, that toast of "William's horse" which had lightened their festivities since his accident:-"'twould lessen much our woe, had Sorrel stumbled thirteen years ago." And he closed with eloquent mention of the heroic death which Burnet's relation made so distasteful to High Church bigotry—

"No conscious guilt disturb'd his royal breast,
Calm as the regions of eternal rest.”

The sincerity of the grief of De Foe had in this work lifted his verse to a higher and firmer tone. It was a heartfelt sorrow. There was no speeding the going, wel

to seize and secure the possession of at least the coast, if not by consequence the Terra Firma, of the empire of Mexico, and thereby entirely cut off the Spanish commerce, and the return of their Plate fleets; by the immense riches whereof, and by which only, both France and Spain have been enabled to support this But the king died, in whose hands this glorious scheme was in a fair way of being concerted, and which, had it gone on, I had had the honour to have been not the first proposer only, but to have had some share in the performance."

war.

1702.1

A FRIEND LOST.

63

coming the coming sovereign, for De Foe. Nothing could replace, nothing too gratefully remember, the past. It was his pride always after to avouch, that to have been "trusted, esteemed, and, much more than I deserved, valued by the best king England ever saw," was more than a compensation for what inferior men could inflict upon him. When, in later years, Lord Haversham denounced him in the House of Lords as a mean and mercenary writer, he told that ungrateful servant of King William, that if he should say he had the honour to know something from his majesty, and to transact something for him, that he would not have trusted Lord Haversham with, perhaps there might be more truth than modesty in it. Still, to the very last, it was his theme. "I never forget his goodness to me," he said, when his own life was wearing to its close. "It was my honour and advantage to call him master as well as sovereign. I never patiently heard his memory slighted, nor ever can do so. Had he lived, he would never have suffered me to be treated as I have been in this world." Ay! good, brave, Daniel De Foe! There is indeed but sorry treatment now in store for you.

F

IV.

ANNE.

1702-1714.

THE accession of Anne was the signal for Tory rejoicings. She was thirty-seven, and her character was formed and known. It was a compound of weakness and of bigotry, but in some sort these availed to counteract each other. Devotion to a High Church principle was needful to her fearful conscience; but reliance on a woman-favourite was needful to her feeble mind. She found Marlborough and Godolphin in office, where they had been placed by their common kinsman, Sunderland; and she raised Godolphin to the post of Lord-Treasurer, and made Marlborough Captain-General. Even if she had not known them to be opponents of the Whigs, she would yet have done this; for she had been some years under the influence of Marlborough's strong-minded wife, and that influence availed to retain the same advisers when she found them converted into what they had opposed. The spirit of The Great lives after them; and this weak, superstitious, "good sort of woman," little thought, when she uttered with so much enjoyment