hearty good nature and social disposition. He had little to remind one of the wary politician, or of the successful, triumphant statesman who had been prime minister for more than twenty years. He looked, acted, and spoke like a plain country gentleman who had rarely quitted his estates. His conversation and manners were somewhat rough and boisterous, even as they always had been, whether in court or cabinet. "I am no professor of ceremony," he wrote to Archibald Duke of Argyle: and no man of his station was less ceremonious. But he had at all times of his life the happy art of making friends, and great powers of persuasion. For business of all kinds he had an extraordinary capacity, and the ease with which he executed it led Lord Herbert to say that he did every thing with the same ease and tranquillity as if he was doing nothing." He afforded a striking contrast to his contemporary the Duke of Newcastle, who was always in a hurry and fluster, who was always doing and never done, and of whom it was said that he looked like a man that had lost half an hour in the morning and was running after it all the rest of the day. Walpole was most hospitable, without the slightest ostentation. Though his habits were so homely, he had many elegant tastes. He was fond of pictures; he was a judge of the merits of high art; and be formed at Houghton the best collection of old masters which had been seen in England since the days of Charles I. Unfortunately the collection of the Whig minister, like that of the Stuart sovereign, was allowed to be broken up and sent out of the country. The pictures at Houghton were mostly bought by the Great Catherine, Empress of Russia.

Walpole never showed any cynical humour, and lived, to the last, with mankind as if he thought well or hopefully of them; but his long ministerial experience had not left on his mind a very favourable impression of the men who meddled with politics and sought for aggrandisement through the avenues of parliament. He was accustomed to say in his old age that it was a fortunate thing so few men could be prime ministers, since every

prime minister must see so much of the trickery and baseness of human nature.

No adequate life of this great statesman has ever been written; but there are good materials collected by Archdeacon Coxe in his Memoirs of Sir Robert Walpole; and every full history of the reigns of George I. and II. bears testimony to the political importance of the man, to his energy, ability, and success. His immediate successors lived upon the fragments of his system, which they had laboured to destroy. During his term of office the national prosperity made immense strides. The unhappy Savage, who had tasted of the minister's as well as of Queen Caroline's bounty, spoke truth, even in a panegyric, when he said—

"Now arts, and trade, and plenty glad the Isle."

THE intellectual character of Swift, a singular combination of the robust and the fanciful, may be said to be half English, half Irish; and he may be considered to have been himself half an Englishman, half an Irishman. If he was actually born in Ireland, he was of English descent by both parents; and it so happened that all that portion of his life in which his mind and character must have been formed, extending from the earliest years of his infancy to middle age, was more or less equally divided between the two countries.

His father's was an English family of old respectability. The eldest branch had been long seated in Yorkshire; and one of its members, Barnam Swift, who passed under the name of Cavaliero Swift, and who is described as a man of wit and humour, had in 1627 been created by Charles I. Viscount of Carlingford in the Irish peerage. He died in 1642, leaving only a daughter, who is stated to have been married to the