Page:Ethel Churchill 2.pdf/248

246 He had no alliance among the great nobility on the one hand; and, at all events at first, was no personal favourite with the sovereign on the other; yet he kept his high post through one of the longest and most prosperous administrations that England has ever known. His faults were those of his day, a day singularly deficient in all high moral attributes. Disbelief in excellence is the worst soil in which the mind can work; we must believe, before we can hope. The political creed, of which expediency is the alpha and the omega, can never know the generous purpose, or the high result. It sees events through a microscope; the detail is accurate, but the magnificent combination, and the glorious distance, are wholly lost. His age looked not beyond to-day; it forgot what it had received from the past, and what it owed to the future. Rochefoucauld says, and most truly, that hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue; now, in Walpole's time, it was not worth vice's while to pay even the poor homage of hypocrisy. Political virtue was laughed at; or, at