Next went Chesterfield.  He too was a Whig and a friend of the Protestant succession.  He was an orator, a courtier, a wit, and a man of letters.  He was at the head of ton in days when, in order to be at the head of ton, it was not sufficient to be dull and supercilious.  It was evident that he submitted impatiently to the ascendency of Walpole.  He murmured against the Excise Bill.  His brothers voted against it in the House of Commons.  The Minister acted with characteristic caution and characteristic energy; caution in the conduct of public affairs; energy where his own supremacy was concerned.  He withdrew his Bill, and turned out all his hostile or wavering colleagues.  Chesterfield was stopped on the great staircase of St. James’s, and summoned to deliver up the staff which he bore as Lord Steward of the Household.  A crowd of noble and powerful functionaries, the Dukes of Montrose and Bolton, Lord Burlington, Lord Stair, Lord Cobham, Lord Marchmont, Lord Clinton, were at the same time dismissed from the service of the Crown,

Not long after these events the Opposition was reinforced by the Duke of Argyle, a man vainglorious indeed and fickle, but brave, eloquent and popular.  It was in a great measure owing to his exertions that the Act of Settlement had been peaceably carried into effect in England immediately after the death of Anne, and that the Jacobite rebellion which, during the following year, broke out in Scotland, had been suppressed.  He too carried over to the minority the aid of his great name, his talents, and his paramount influence in his native country.

In each of these cases taken separately, a skilful defender of Walpole might perhaps make out a case for him.  But when we see that during a long course of years all the footsteps are turned the same way, that all the most eminent of those public men who agreed with the Minister in their general views of policy left him, one after another, with sore and irritated minds, we find it impossible not to believe that the real explanation of the phaenomenon is to be found in the words of his son, “Sir Robert Walpole loved power so much that he would not endure a rival.”  Hume has described this famous minister with great felicity in one short sentence,—­“moderate in exercising power, not equitable in engrossing it.”  Kind-hearted, jovial, and placable as Walpole was, he was yet a man with whom no person of high pretensions and high spirit could long continue to act.  He had, therefore, to stand against an Opposition containing all the most accomplished statesmen of the age, with no better support than that which he received from persons like his brother Horace or Henry Pelham, whose industrious mediocrity gave no cause for jealousy, or from clever adventurers, whose situation and character diminished the dread which their talents might have inspired.  To this last class belonged Fox, who was too poor to live without office; Sir William Yonge, of whom Walpole himself said, that “Nothing but such parts could buoy up such a character, and that nothing but such a character could drag down such parts; and Winnington, whose private morals lay, justly or unjustly, under imputations of the worst kind.”