France so much as for his own glory; he would fight to gain his purpose while there was a pistole in his treasury, and we must not expect Paris to be taken in a week.  Nothing could be more admirable than Godolphin’s management of our own Treasury; he deserved almost more credit than the Duke himself.  “Your Treasurer has been your general of generals; without his exquisite management of the cash the Duke of Marlborough must have been beaten.”

The Sacheverell incident, which ultimately led to the overthrow of the Ministry, gave Defoe a delightful opening for writing in their defence.  A collection of his articles on this subject would show his controversial style at its best and brightest.  Sacheverell and he were old antagonists.  Sacheverell’s “bloody flag and banner of defiance,” and other High-flying truculencies, had furnished him with the main basis of his Shortest Way with the Dissenters.  The laugh of the populace was then on Defoe’s side, partly, perhaps, because the Government had prosecuted him.  But in the changes of the troubled times, the Oxford Doctor, nurtured in “the scolding of the ancients,” had found a more favourable opportunity.  His literary skill was of the most mechanical kind; but at the close of 1709, when hopes of peace had been raised only to be disappointed, and the country was suffering from the distress of a prolonged war, people were more in a mood to listen to a preacher who disdained to check the sweep of his rhetoric by qualifications or abatements, and luxuriated in denouncing the Queen’s Ministers from the pulpit under scriptural allegories.  He delivered a tremendous philippic about the Perils of False Brethren, as a sermon before the Lord Mayor in November.  It would have been a wise thing for the Ministry to have left Sacheverell to be dealt with by their supporters in the press and in the pulpit.  But in an evil hour Godolphin, stung by a nickname thrown at him by the rhetorical priest—­a singularly comfortable-looking man to have so virulent a tongue, one of those orators who thrive on ill-conditioned language—­resolved, contrary to the advice of more judicious colleagues, to have him impeached by the House of Commons.  The Commons readily voted the sermon seditious, scandalous, and malicious, and agreed to a resolution for his impeachment; the Lords ordered that the case should be heard at their bar; and Westminster Hall was prepared to be the scene of a great public trial.  At first Defoe, in heaping contemptuous ridicule upon the High-flying Doctor, had spoken as if he would consider prosecution a blunder.  The man ought rather to be encouraged to go on exposing himself and his party.  “Let him go on,” he said, “to bully Moderation, explode Toleration, and damn the Union; the gain will be ours.”