acts gained for him the name of the infamous Duke of Wharton.  Never was character more mercurial, or life more unsettled than his; never, perhaps, were more changes crowded into a fewer number of years, more fame and infamy gathered into so short a space.  Suffice it to say that when Pope wanted a man to hold up to the scorn of the world, as a sample of wasted abilities, it was Wharton that he chose, and his lines rise in grandeur in proportion to the vileness of the theme: 

’Wharton, the scorn and wonder of our days,
Whose ruling passion was a love of praise. 
Born with whate’er could win it from the wise,
Women and fools must like him or he dies;
Though raptured senates hung on all he spoke,
The club must hail him master of the joke. 
Shall parts so various aim at nothing new? 
He’ll shine a Tully and a Wilmot too.

* * * * *

Thus with each gift of nature and of art,
And wanting nothing but an honest heart;
Grown all to all, from no one vice exempt,
And most contemptible, to shun contempt;
His passion still, to covet general praise,
His life to forfeit it a thousand ways;
A constant bounty which no friend has made;
An angel tongue which no man can persuade;
A fool with more of wit than all mankind;
Too rash for thought, for action too refined.’

And then those memorable lines—­

    ’A tyrant to the wife his heart approved,
     A rebel to the very king he loved;
     He dies, sad outcast of each church and state;
     And, harder still! flagitious, yet not great.’

Though it may be doubted if the ‘lust of praise’ was the cause of his eccentricities, so much as an utter restlessness and instability of character, Pope’s description is sufficiently correct, and will prepare us for one of the most disappointing lives we could well have to read.

Philip, Duke of Wharton, was one of those men of whom an Irishman would say, that they were fortunate before they were born.  His ancestors bequeathed him a name that stood high in England for bravery and excellence.  The first of the house, Sir Thomas Wharton, had won his peerage from Henry VIII. for routing some 15,000 Scots with 500 men, and other gallant deeds.  From his father the marquis he inherited much of his talents; but for the heroism of the former, he seems to have received it only in the extravagant form of foolhardiness.  Walpole remembered, but could not tell where, a ballad he wrote on being arrested by the guard in St. James’s Park, for singing the Jacobite song, ‘The King shall have his own again,’ and quotes two lines to show that he was not ashamed of his own cowardice on the occasion:—­

    ’The duke he drew out half his sword,
     ——­ the guard drew out the rest.’