the faculties which would not enable him to soar into a higher sphere will enable him to distance all his competitors in the lower.  As a poet Montague could never have risen above the crowd.  But in the House of Commons, now fast becoming supreme in the State, and extending its control over one executive department after another, the young adventurer soon obtained a place very different from the place which he occupies among men of letters.  At thirty, he would gladly have given all his chances in life for a comfortable vicarage and a chaplain’s scarf.  At thirty-seven, he was First Lord of the Treasury, Chancellor of the Exchequer and a Regent of the kingdom; and this elevation he owed not at all to favour, but solely to the unquestionable superiority of his talents for administration and debate.

The extraordinary ability with which, at the beginning of the year 1692, he managed the conference on the Bill for regulating Trials in cases of Treason, placed him at once in the first rank of parliamentary orators.  On that occasion he was opposed to a crowd of veteran senators renowned for their eloquence, Halifax, Rochester, Nottingham, Mulgrave, and proved himself a match for them all.  He was speedily seated at the Board of Treasury; and there the clearheaded and experienced Godolphin soon found that his young colleague was his master.  When Somers had quitted the House of Commons, Montague had no rival there.  Sir Thomas Littleton, once distinguished as the ablest debater and man of business among the Whig members, was content to serve under his junior.  To this day we may discern in many parts of our financial and commercial system the marks of the vigorous intellect and daring spirit of Montague.  His bitterest enemies were unable to deny that some of the expedients which he had proposed had proved highly beneficial to the nation.  But it was said that these expedients were not devised by himself.  He was represented, in a hundred pamphlets, as the daw in borrowed plumes.  He had taken, it was affirmed, the hint of every one of his great plans from the writings or the conversation of some ingenious speculator.  This reproach was, in truth, no reproach.  We can scarcely expect to find in the same human being the talents which are necessary for the making of new discoveries in political science, and the talents which obtain the assent of divided and tumultuous assemblies to great practical reforms.  To be at once an Adam Smith and a Pitt is scarcely possible.  It is surely praise enough for a busy politician that he knows how to use the theories of others, that he discerns, among the schemes of innumerable projectors, the precise scheme which is wanted and which is practicable, that he shapes it to suit pressing circumstances and popular humours, that he proposes it just when it is most likely to be favourably received, that he triumphantly defends it against all objectors, and that he carries it into execution with prudence and energy; and to this praise no English statesman has a fairer claim than Montague.