Defoe and Swift had both done their work; and the latter had withdrawn to Ireland to die like a rat in a hole.

Bishop Berkeley, indeed, was convinced of the decadence of England; but his _Essay towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain_ (1721) shows rather the effect of the speculative mania which culminated in the South Sea Bubble upon a noble moral nature than a genius for political thought.
Certainly no one in that generation was likely to regard with seriousness proposals for the endowment of motherhood and a tax upon the estate of bachelors.

The cynical sophistries of Mandeville were, despite the indignation they aroused, more suited to the age that Walpole governed.

It is, in fact, the character of the minister which sets the keynote of the time.

An able speaker, without being a great orator, a superb administrator, eager rather for power than for good, rating men low by instinct and corrupting them by intelligence, Walpole was not the man, either in type of mind or of temperament, to bring great questions to the foreground of debate.