Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, dazzled and perplexed his contemporaries. Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift revered his eloquence and charm, while Sir Robert Walpole despised his hypocrisy and untrammeled ambition. His precocious rise and precipitous fall in Parliament, his sustained opposition campaign studded with rash misjudgments, his political expediency clothed in uncompromising principles: Bolingbroke's contradictions perpetuate dispute over his achievements. Whether an idealist or an opportunist, however, Bolingbroke consistently expressed the yearnings of contemporary Tories for a return to government by the landed interest. Despite his preference for an end to parties, he instituted the notion of a "loyal opposition." His Craftsman essays and occasional writings inspired Swift, Pope, and John Gay to create satiric masterpieces. And his style still merits analysis as a rhetorical exposition of conservative ideology, although political scientists may no longer agree with John Adams that "there is nothing so profound, correct, and perfect...