BY LORD BOLINGBROKE CASSELL AND COMPANY, Limited LONDON , PARIS & MELBOURNE 1894...

Henry St. John , who became Viscount Bolingbroke in 1712, was born on the 1st of October, 1678, at the family manor of Battersea, then a country village.  His grandfather, Sir Walter St. John, lived there with his wife Johanna,—daughter to Cromwell’s Chief Justice, Oliver St. John,—in one home with the child’s father, Henry St. John, who was married to the second daughter of Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick.  The child’s grandfather, a man of high character, lived to the age of eighty-seven; and his

I was well enough acquainted with the general character of mankind, and in particular with that of my own countrymen, to expect to be as much out of the minds of the Tories during my exile as if we had never lived and acted together.  I depended on being forgot by them, and was far from imagining it possible that I should be remembered only to be condemned loudly by one half of them, and to be tacitly censured by the greatest part of the other half.  As soon as I was separated from the Pretender

Dear Sir ,—Since you have begun, at my request, the work which I have wished long that you would undertake, it is but reasonable that I submit to the task you impose upon me.  The mere compliance with anything you desire, is a pleasure to me.  On the present occasion, however, this compliance is a little interested; and that I may not assume more merit with you than I really have, I will own that in performing this act of friendship—for such you are willing to esteem it—the purity of my motive i