POLITICAL STATE OF ENGLAND 3

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suppose it will cool again in less than three hundred years. In such a tract of time it is sible that the heats of the present age may be extinguished, and our several classes of great men represented under their proper characters." Addison perceived that the condition of England at the beginning of the eighteenth century was remarkable and exceptional: the nation was still acutely sensitive after repeated and extraordinary constitutional crises, after the bitter conflicts of the preceding half-century between Churchmen and Nonconformists. New conditions-political, commercial, and social-were coming into existence, of which the men who were taking part in the national evolution were wholly inappreciative. By a study of Harley's career, the centre as it was of the political life of his age, by discarding many personal and encumbering details, we are better able to estimate the real forces which were at work beneath a mass of intrigue and invective, of suspicion and fear.

If Harley's capacity has been unduly depreciated by some historians, it would, on the other hand, be wrong to rank him as a statesman either of large intellect or of conspicuous strength of character. He was not a Chatham, a Pitt, or a Fox; he was not even a Walpole: but there is this solid fact, which is worth more than praise or depreciation, that when many able and brilliant

persons were engaged in public life, he succeeded by his individual capacity in attaining to the highest place, whilst for years before he became Prime Minister he was regarded with respect and often with admiration by those who were the best able to appreciate political merit. A tiresome manner, an almost wearisome knowledge of parliamentary forms and history, involved speech, all tending, it has been said, to hide the deficiencies of his mind and to impose upon his hearers, will not permit a politician without remarkable capacity to reach the place which Harley attained.

Harley's life as a whole, especially his birth, his family, and his character, have not been sufficently considered; isolated facts have been dwelt on so as to give them undue importance, and his career has been generally surveyed from the point of view of other times, detached from its political atmosphere. His actions have been tested by a different standard from that which prevailed in his own time, when duplicity was regarded as statesmanship, and when De Foe could assert as necessary what he calls "that old maxim of Politicks" that "men might be made use of when they can serve us, without any real design to serve them"; in other words, that deception was admirable. Statements cannot be too carefully received if made when truth is at a discount, and when exaggerated eulogy is considered as little more than common courtesy. We

A PARLIAMENTARY STATESMAN 5

sometimes forget that the fine lines which have impressed succeeding generations with Pope's high estimate of Harley, were prefixed to an edition of the works of Parnell, and were a dedication by which Pope hoped to please a nobleman whose recommendation, though his political influence had departed, was still invaluable to an author.

But the time has come when some attempt may be made to describe without prejudice the most noticeable features in the career of a statesman who played a great part in his day, and who is an interesting study; for he is the most modern of the politicians of the age of Anne, an age which in politics, letters, and commerce was the beginning of our own. Though he had neither the ability of some of his contemporaries, nor the resolute will of others, not one of them had anything like the same capacity as a parliamentary leader, or the same sensitive perception of public opinion. Harley is the typical parliamentary statesman born an age too soon, living in years which formed part of a period of transition, both social and political, and which was also marked by features of the most remarkable and serious character-a great European war, and some uncertainty as to the succession to the throne of England.

To his ancestors and his family, Robert Harley owed some of his success, and their influence was lifelong. Then, as now, important family connec

tions made the first steps of a political career more easy for a beginner,-they could open the way to fortune though they could not assure it,-and in Harley's case, the effects of early training and association were clearly apparent at a late stage of public life.

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Robert Harley came of an old Herefordshire family. Originally the Harleys lived in Shropshire, but in the reign of Henry III. they became -by the marriage of Robert de Harley with Margaret de Brampton the possessors Brampton Castle' and with it of a considerable estate at Brampton Bryan, in that agreeable broken country which lies on the Welsh border, between the Clun Hills and the larger valleys, and spreading pastures, which extend from Leominster to the Severn. Somewhat remote, it has many pleasant characteristics: hills and hanging woods, small rivers, and villages of thatched cottages with picturesque black and white walls, numerous apple orchards, and grey church towers, give the landscape pleasing variety. In medieval times the castle and the church stood side by side, almost surrounded by the village; a park studded with well-grown oaks stretched as it does to-day-up the hillside to the west, and pastures sloped from the castle walls to the willows by the Teme. In 1644 both

1 The Castles of Herefordshire. By the Rev. C. J. Robinson, p. 8.