By this time it became clear that the relations between the executive government and the Parliament were again what they had been before the year 1695.  The history of our polity at this time is closely connected with the history of one man.  Hitherto Montague’s career had been more splendidly and uninterruptedly successful than that of any member of the House of Commons, since the House of Commons had begun to exist.  And now fortune had turned.  By the Tories he had long been hated as a Whig; and the rapidity of his rise, the brilliancy of his fame, and the unvarying good luck which seemed to attend him, had made many Whigs his enemies.  He was absurdly compared to the upstart favourites of a former age, Carr and Villiers, men whom he resembled in nothing but in the speed with which he had mounted from a humble to a lofty position.  They had, without rendering any service to the State, without showing any capacity for the conduct of great affairs, been elevated to the highest dignities, in spite of the murmurs of the whole nation, by the mere partiality of the Sovereign.  Montague owed every thing to his own merit and to the public opinion of his merit.  With his master he appears to have had very little intercourse, and none that was not official.  He was in truth a living monument of what the Revolution had done for the Country.  The Revolution had found him a young student in a cell by the Cam, poring on the diagrams which illustrated the newly discovered laws of centripetal and centrifugal force, writing little copies of verses, and indulging visions of parsonages with rich glebes, and of closes in old cathedral towns had developed in him new talents; had held out to him the hope of prizes of a very different sort from a rectory or a prebend.  His eloquence had gained for him the ear of the legislature.  His skill in fiscal and commercial affairs had won for him the confidence of the City.  During four years he had been the undisputed leader of the majority of the House of Commons; and every one of those years he had made memorable by great parliamentary victories, and by great public services.  It should seem that his success ought to have been gratifying to the nation, and especially to that assembly of which he was the chief ornament, of which indeed he might be called the creature.  The representatives of the people ought to have been well pleased to find that their approbation could, in the new order of things, do for the man whom they delighted to honour all that the mightiest of the Tudors could do for Leicester, or the most arbitrary of the Stuarts for Strafford.  But, strange to say, the Commons soon began to regard with an evil eve that greatness which was their own work.  The fault indeed was partly Montague’s.  With all his ability, he had not the wisdom to avert, by suavity and moderation, that curse, the inseparable concomitant of prosperity and glory, which the ancients personified under the name of Nemesis.  His head, strong for all the purposes of debate and arithmetical