and proportion of corruption in Walpole's management of members is to be gathered from what he did to secure the rejection of the bill for lowering the interest on the funds. He got time enough, says Hervey, "to go about to talk to people, to solicit, to intimidate, to argue, to persuade, and perhaps to bribe." This may be taken as a fair example of his usual practice. Bribery was an expedient in the last resort, and the appeal to cupidity came after appeals to friendship, to fear, to reason, and to all those mixed motives, creditable, permissible, and equivocal, which guide votes in reformed and unreformed Parliaments alike.

$9. Walpole's Private Affairs

The pecuniary affairs of public men are no concern of the outside world, unless they are tainted with improbity. So many charges were made against Walpole under this head, that it is necessary to glance at them. I shall begin with the least serious. Very early in his career of minister Walpole was taunted with abusing his patronage by granting places and reversions of places to his relatives. When his son Horace was little more than a child, he was made Clerk of the Estreats and Controller of the Pipe, with a salary of £300 a year. At the age of eighteen or nineteen, he became Inspector of Customs; on resigning that post a year later, he was made Usher of the Exchequer, then worth £900 a year; and Horace Walpole was able to boast that from the age of twenty he was no charge to his family. The duty of the usher was to furnish paper, pens, ink, wax, sand, tape, penknives, scissors, and parchment to the Exchequer, and the profits rose from £900 a year to an average of double that amount. The post of Collector of the Customs, worth nearly £2000 a year, was granted to Walpole himself, and for the lives of Robert and Edward his sons. The bulk of the proceeds of this patent he devised to his son Horace. In 1721 the minister made his eldest son Clerk of the Pells, with three thousand a year; and in 1739 he gave him the gigantic prize of Auditor of the Exchequer, with a salary of seven thousand. Then when the eldest son resigned the pells on receiving the auditorship, the pells and the three thousand a year went to Edward Walpole, the next brother. All these great patent offices were sinecures; they were always executed by deputy; the principal had not a week's work to do from the first annual quarter day to the last. We can imagine how these rank abominations would stink in the nostrils of the House of Commons

and the Treasury to-day. Yet it is worth remembering that Burke, when he proposed his famous plan of economical reform (1780), though he admitted that the magnitude of the profits in the great patent offices called for reformation, still looked with complacency on an exchequer list filled with the descendants of the Walpoles, the Pelhams, and the Townshends, and maintained the expediency of these indirect provisions for the families of great public servants. Indirect rewards have long disappeared, and nothing is more certain than that the whole system of political pension, even as a direct and personal reward, is drawing to an end. Whether either the purity or the efficiency of political service will gain by the change is not so certain. Walpole at least can hardly be censured for doing what, in the very height of his zeal for reform, Burke seriously and deliberately defended.

Abuse of patronage, however, was the least formidable of the charges that descended year after year in a storm on Walpole's head. He was roundly and constantly charged with sustaining a lavish private expenditure by peculation from public funds. The palace which he built for himself in Norfolk was matter for endless scandal. He planted gardens, people said, in places to which the very earth had to be transported in wagons. He set fountains flowing and cascades tumbling, where water was to be conveyed by long acqueducts and costly machines. He was a modern Sardanapalus, imitating the extravagance of Oriental monarchs at the expense of a free people whom he was at cnce impoverishing and betraying. They described him as going down to his country seat loaded with the spoils of an unfortunate nation. He had purchased most of the county of Norfolk, and held at least one-half of the stock of the Bank of England. It was plainly hinted that in view of a possible impeachment at some future day, he had made himself safe by investing £150,000 in jewels and plate as an easily portable form of wealth. He had also secretly despatched £400,000 in a single year to bankers at Amsterdam, Vienna, Genoa, to be ready for him in case of untoward accidents.

These lively fabrications undoubtedly represented the common rumor and opinion of the time, and were excellently fitted to nourish the popular dislike with which Walpole came to be regarded. They had their origin in the same suspicious temper toward an unpopular minister, which two generations before had made the people of London give to Clarendon's new palace in Piccadilly the name of Dunkirk House, and which a generation later prompted the charge that Lord Bute's great house and park at Luton had

come out of the bribes of France. They had hardly more solid foundation than the charge of saturating Parliament with corruption. The truth seems to be that Walpole, like both the Pitts, was inexact and careless about money. Profusion was a natural element in a large, loose, jovial character like his, too incessantly preoccupied with business, power, government, and high affairs of State to have much regard for a wise private economy. He was supposed to contribute handsomely toward the expense of fighting elections. He expended in building, adding, and improving at Houghton the sum of £200,000. He built a lodge in Richmond Park at a cost of £14,000. His famous hunting congresses are said to have come to £3000 a year - rather a moderate sum, according to the standard of to-day, for keeping open house for a whole county for several weeks in a vast establishment like Houghton. His collection of pictures was set down by Horace Walpole as having cost him £40,000 more; but this I suspect to be a very doubtful figure, for according to a contemporary letter in Nichol's Literary Anecdotes, so many of the pictures were presents, that the whole cost could hardly have reached £30,000; and it is worth noting that the famous Guido, the gem of the collection, while it cost him some £600, was valued in the catalogue when it came to be sold to the Czarina at £3500. For all this outlay, his foes contended that the income of his estate and the known salary of his offices were inadequate. They assumed, therefore, that the requisite funds were acquired by the sale of honors, places, and pensions, and by the plunder of the secret-service money.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Stanhope (Lord Mahon), History of England from 1713 to 1783, Vol. III, chap. xxiv. Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. I, chaps. ii and iii. Cox, Memoirs of the Life and Administration of Walpole, an old but valuable work. Ewald, Sir Robert Walpole.

CHAPTER II

JOHN WESLEY AND METHODISM

It is generally admitted by historians that the religious life of the early part of the eighteenth century was marked by indifference and scepticism. Clergymen in the Established and Dissenting churches emphasized the intellect rather than the feelings in religion; heated theological controversies and polemical pamphleteering fell out of fashion; instead of revelation or authority alone, theologians emphasized reason as the guide to religious truth. Voltaire, who had been in England, described an English sermon of the age as a "solid but sometimes dry dissertation which a man reads to the people without gesture and without particular exaltation of the voice." Another French visitor, Montesquieu, declared that there was no religion in England, and that the mention of it excited laughter. Even a distinguished bishop of the Church, Berkeley, wrote that cold indifference for all matters of faith and divine worship was thought good sense, and that it was so fashionable to deny religion that a good Christian could hardly keep himself in countenance when it was mentioned. Though the religion of an age is difficult to measure and these sweeping statements of contemporaries must be taken with caution, there can be no doubt that, as a vital force in the lives of men, religion was at a very low ebb. The lower classes were often coarse and brutal in their habits, and they do not seem to have been reached by the ordinary sermons. It was under such conditions that there originated in England a religious awakening that was destined to become one of the most powerful movements in the history of Christianity. Many accounts have been written about this movement and its founders, but most of them have been seriously biassed

by the convictions of the authors. A very fair view is to be found in Mr. Lecky's great work on the eighteenth century.

§ 1. John Wesley and the Oxford Group1

All ex

The Methodist movement was a purely religious one. planations which ascribe it to the ambition of its leaders, or to merely intellectual causes, are at variance with the facts of the case. The term Methodist was a college nickname bestowed upon a small society of students at Oxford, who met together between 1729 and 1735 for the purpose of mutual improvement. They were accustomed to communicate every week, to fast regularly on Wednesdays and Fridays, and on most days during Lent, to read and discuss the Bible in common, to abstain from most forms of amusement and luxury, and to visit sick persons and prisoners in the jail.

John Wesley, the master spirit of this society, and the future leader of the religious revival of the eighteenth century, was born in 1703, and was the second surviving son of Samuel Wesley, the rector of Epworth, in Lincolnshire. His father, who had early abandoned Non-conformity, and acquired some reputation by many works both in prose and verse, had obtained his living from the government of William, and had led for many years a useful and studious life, maintaining a far higher standard of clerical duty than was common in his time. His mother was the daughter of an eminent Non-conformist minister, who had been ejected in 1662, and was a woman of rare mental endowments, of intense piety, and of a strong, original, and somewhat stern character. Their home was not a happy one. Discordant dispositions and many troubles darkened it. The family was very large. Many children died early. The father sank slowly into debt. His parishioners were fierce, profligate, and recalcitrant. When John Wesley was only six years old the rectory was burnt to the ground, and the child was forgotten among the flames, and only saved at the last moment by what he afterward deemed an extraordinary Providence. All these circumstances doubtless deepened the natural and inherited piety for which he was so remarkable, and some strange and unexplained noises which during a long period were heard in the rectory, and which its inmates concluded to be

'Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century, Cabinet Edition, Vol. III, pp. 37 ff. By permission of D. Appleton & Company, Publishers.