had come to him, through his wife, by the death of his wife's father
the year before. He was thirty years old, the most brilliant of the
rising statesmen; impatient of Harley as a leader and of Walpole as
his younger rival from the other side, both of them men who, in his
eyes, were dull and slow. St. John's quick intellect, though eager
and impatient of successful rivalry, had its philosophic turn.
During these two years of retirement he indulged the calmer love of
study and thought, whose genius he said once, in a letter to Lord
Bathurst "On the True use of Retirement and Study," "unlike the
dream of Socrates, whispered so softly, that very often I heard him
not, in the hurry of those passions by which I was transported.
Some calmer hours there were; in them I hearkened to him.
Reflection had often its turn, and the love of study and the desire
of knowledge have never quite abandoned me."

In 1710 the Whigs were out and Harley in again, with St. John in his
ministry as Secretary of State. "I am thinking," wrote Swift to
Stella, "what a veneration we used to have for Sir William Temple
because he might have been Secretary of State at fifty; and here is
a young fellow hardly thirty in that employment."

It was the policy of the Tories to put an end to the war with
France, that was against all their political interests. The Whigs
wished to maintain it as a safeguard against reaction in favour of
the Pretender. In the peace negotiations nobody was so active as
Secretary St. John. On one occasion, without consulting his
colleagues, he wrote to the Duke of Ormond, who commanded the
English army in the Netherlands: "Her Majesty, my lord, has reason
to believe that we shall come to an agreement on the great article
of the union of the two monarchies as soon as a courier sent from