Both were gentlemen of honourable descent; both were distinguished by their fine persons and graceful manners; both were renowned for eloquence; and both loved learning and learned men.  It may be added that both had early in life been noted for prodigality and love of pleasure.  Dissipation had made them poor; poverty had made them industrious; and though they were still, as age is reckoned at the Inns of Court, very young men, Harcourt only thirty-six, Cowper only thirty-two, they already had the first practice at the bar.  They were destined to rise still higher, to be the bearers of the great seal of the realm, and the founders of patrician houses.  In politics they were diametrically opposed to each other.  Harcourt had seen the Revolution with disgust, had not chosen to sit in the Convention, had with difficulty reconciled his conscience to the oaths, and had tardily and unwillingly signed the Association.  Cowper had been in arms for the Prince of Orange and a free Parliament, and had, in the short and tumultuary campaign which preceded the flight of James, distinguished himself by intelligence and courage.  Since Somers had been removed to the Woolsack, the law officers of the Crown had not made a very distinguished figure in the Lower House, or indeed any where else; and their deficiencies had been more than once supplied by Cowper.  His skill had, at the trial of Parkyns, recovered the verdict which the mismanagement of the Solicitor General had, for a moment, put in jeopardy.  He had been chosen member for Hertford at the general election of 1695, and had scarcely taken his seat when he attained a high place among parliamentary speakers.  Chesterfield many years later, in one of his letters to his son, described Cowper as an orator who never spoke without applause, but who reasoned feebly, and who owed the influence which he long exercised over great assemblies to the singular charm of his style, his voice and his action.  Chesterfield was, beyond all doubt, intellectually qualified to form a correct judgment on such a subject.  But it must be remembered that the object of his letters was to exalt good taste and politeness in opposition to much higher qualities.  He therefore constantly and systematically attributed the success of the most eminent persons of his age to their superiority, not in solid abilities and acquirements, but in superficial graces of diction and manner.  He represented even Marlborough as a man of very ordinary capacity, who, solely because he was extremely well bred and well spoken, had risen from poverty and obscurity to the height of power and glory.  It may confidently be pronounced that both to Marlborough and to Cowper Chesterfield was unjust.  The general who saved the Empire and conquered the Low Countries was assuredly something more than a fine gentleman; and the judge who presided during nine years in the Court of Chancery with the approbation of all parties must have been something more than a fine declaimer.