The most dissolute cavaliers stood aghast at the dissoluteness of the emancipated precisian.  He early acquired and retained to the last the reputation of being the greatest rake in England.  Of wine indeed he never became the slave; and he used it chiefly for the purpose of making himself the master of his associates.  But to the end of his long life the wives and daughters of his nearest friends were not safe from his licentious plots.  The ribaldry of his conversation moved astonishment even in that age.  To the religion of his country he offered, in the mere wantonness of impiety, insults too foul to be described.  His mendacity and his effrontery passed into proverbs.  Of all the liars of his time he was the most deliberate, the most inventive and the most circumstantial.  What shame meant he did not seem to understand.  No reproaches, even when pointed and barbed with the sharpest wit, appeared to give him pain.  Great satirists, animated by a deadly personal aversion, exhausted all their strength in attacks upon him.  They assailed him with keen invective; they assailed him with still keener irony; but they found that neither invective nor irony could move him to any thing but an unforced smile and a goodhumoured curse; and they at length threw down the lash, acknowledging that it was impossible to make him feel.  That, with such vices, he should have played a great part in life, should have carried numerous elections against the most formidable opposition by his personal popularity, should have had a large following in Parliament, should have risen to the highest offices of the State, seems extraordinary.  But he lived in times when faction was almost a madness; and he possessed in an eminent degree the qualities of the leader of a faction.  There was a single tie which he respected.  The falsest of mankind in all relations but one, he was the truest of Whigs.  The religious tenets of his family he had early renounced with contempt; but to the politics of his family he stedfastly adhered through all the temptations and dangers of half a century.  In small things and in great his devotion to his party constantly appeared.  He had the finest stud in England; and his delight was to win plates from Tories.  Sometimes when, in a distant county, it was fully expected that the horse of a High Church squire would be first on the course, down came, on the very eve of the race, Wharton’s Careless, who had ceased to run at Newmarket merely for want of competitors, or Wharton’s Gelding, for whom Lewis the Fourteenth had in vain offered a thousand pistoles.  A man whose mere sport was of this description was not likely to be easily beaten in any serious contest.  Such a master of the whole art of electioneering England had never seen.  Buckinghamshire was his own especial province; and there he ruled without a rival.  But he extended his care over the Whig interest in Yorkshire, Cumberland, Westmoreland, Wiltshire.  Sometimes twenty, sometimes thirty, members of Parliament were named by him.