Wharton’s political adversaries thirsted for his blood, and repeatedly tried to shed it.  Had he not been a man of imperturbable temper, dauntless courage and consummate skill in fence, his life would have been a short one.  But neither anger nor danger ever deprived him of his presence of mind; he was an incomparable swordsman; and he had a peculiar way of disarming opponents which moved the envy of all the duellists of his time.  His friends said that he had never given a challenge, that he had never refused one, that he had never taken a life, and yet that he had never fought without having his antagonist’s life at his mercy.481

The four men who have been described resembled each other so little that it may be thought strange that they should ever have been able to act in concert.  They did, however, act in the closest concert during many years.  They more than once rose and more than once fell together.  But their union lasted till it was dissolved by death.  Little as some of them may have deserved esteem, none of them can be accused of having been false to his brethren of the Junto.

While the great body of the Whigs was, under these able chiefs, arraying itself in order resembling that of a regular army, the Tories were in a state of an ill drilled and ill officered militia.  They were numerous; and they were zealous; but they can hardly be said to have had, at this time, any chief in the House of Commons.  The name of Seymour had once been great among them, and had not quite lost its influence.  But, since he had been at the Board of Treasury, he had disgusted them by vehemently defending all that he had himself, when out of place, vehemently attacked.  They had once looked up to the Speaker, Trevor; but his greediness, impudence and venality were now so notorious that all respectable gentlemen, of all shades of opinion, were ashamed to see him in the chair.  Of the old Tory members Sir Christopher Musgrave alone had much weight.  Indeed the real leaders of the party were two or three men bred in principles diametrically opposed to Toryism, men who had carried Whiggism to the verge of republicanism, and who had been considered not merely as Low Churchmen, but as more than half Presbyterians.  Of these men the most eminent were two great Herefordshire squires, Robert Harley and Paul Foley.

The space which Robert Harley fills in the history of three reigns, his elevation, his fall, the influence which, at a great crisis, he exercised on the politics of all Europe, the close intimacy in which he lived with some of the greatest wits and poets of his time, and the frequent recurrence of his name in the works of Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot, and Prior, must always make him an object of interest.  Yet the man himself was of all men the least interesting.  There is indeed a whimsical contrast between the very ordinary qualities of his mind and the very extraordinary vicissitudes of his fortune.