the best.  To Halifax full justice has never been done, for we have had no capable historian of the late seventeenth century but Macaulay, and Halifax’s defect of fervour as a Jacobite was more than made up to Macaulay by his defect of fervour as a Williamite.  As for the moderns, I have myself more than once failed to induce editors of ‘series’ to give Halifax a place.  Yet Macaulay himself has been fairer to the great Trimmer than to most persons with whom he was not in full sympathy.  The weakness of Halifax’s position is indeed obvious.  When you run first to one side of the boat and then to the other, you have ten chances of sinking to one of trimming her.  To hold fast to one party only, and to keep that from extremes, is the only secret, and it is no great disgrace to Halifax, that in the very infancy of the party and parliamentary system, he did not perceive it.  But this hardly interferes at all with the excellence of his pamphlets.  The polished style, the admirable sense, the subdued and yet ever present wit, the avoidance of excessive cleverness (the one thing that the average Briton will not stand), the constant eye on the object, are unmistakable.  They are nearly as forcible as Dryden’s political and controversial prefaces, which are pamphlets themselves in their way, and they excel them in knowledge of affairs, in urbanity, in adaptation to the special purpose.  In all these points they resemble more than anything else the pamphlets of Paul Louis Courier, and there can be no higher praise than this.

No age in English history was more fertile in pamphlets than the reigns of William and of Anne.  Some men of real distinction occasionally contributed to them, and others (such as Ferguson and Maynwaring) obtained such literary notoriety as they possess by their means.  The total volume of the kind produced during the quarter of a century between the Revolution and the accession of George the First would probably fill a considerable library.  But the examples which really deserve exhumation are very few, and I doubt whether any can pretend to vie with the masterpieces of Defoe and Swift.  Both these great writers were accomplished practitioners in the art, and the characteristics of both lent themselves with peculiar yet strangely different readiness to the work.  They addressed, indeed, different sections of what was even then the electorate.  Defoe’s unpolished realism and his exact adaptation of tone, thought, taste, and fancy to the measure of the common Englishman were what chiefly gave him a hearing.  Swift aimed and flew higher, but also did not miss the lower mark.  No one has ever doubted that Johnson’s depreciation of The Conduct of the Allies was half special perversity (for he was always unjust to Swift), half mere humorous paradox.  For there was much more of this in the doctor’s utterances than his admirers, either in his own day or since, have always recognised, or have sometimes been qualified by Providence to recognise.  As for the Drapier’s Letters I can never myself admire them enough, and they seem to me to have been on the whole under-rather than over-valued by posterity.