Fear, cruelty, avarice, and pride, are wholly strangers to his nature; but he is not without ambition.

There is one thing peculiar in his temper, which I altogether disapprove, and do not remember to have heard or met with in any other man's character: I mean, an easiness and indifference under any imputation, although he be never so innocent, and although the strongest probabilities and appearance are against him; so that I have known him often suspected by his nearest friends, for some months, in points of the highest importance, to a degree, that they were ready to break with him, and only undeceived by time and accident.

His detractors, who charge him with cunning, are but ill acquainted with his character; for, in the sense they take the word, and as it is usually understood, I know no man to whom that mean talent could be with less justice applied, as the conduct of affairs, while he hath been at the helm, doth clearly demonstrate, very contrary to the nature and principles of cunning, which is always employed in serving little turns, proposing little ends, and supplying daily exigencies by little shifts and expedients.

But to rescue a prince out of the hands of insolent subjects, bent upon such designs as must probably end in the ruin of the government; to find out means for paying such exorbitant debts as this nation hath been involved in, and reduce it to a better management; to make a potent enemy offer advantageous terms of peace, and deliver up the most important fortress of his kingdom, as a security;[11] and this against all the opposition, mutually raised and inflamed by parties and allies; such performances can only be called cunning by those whose want of understanding, or of candour, puts them upon finding ill names for great qualities of the mind, which themselves do neither possess, nor can form any just conception of.

However, it must be allowed, that an obstinate love of secrecy in this minister seems, at distance, to have some resemblance of cunning; for he is not only very retentive of secrets, but appears to be so too, which I number amongst his defects.
He hath been blamed by his friends for refusing to discover his intentions, even in those points where the wisest man may have need of advice and assistance, and some have censured him, upon that account, as if he were jealous of power but he hath been heard to answer, "That he seldom did otherwise, without cause to repent" [Footnote 11: This is surely a piece of Swift's partiality for Oxford; since it practically deprives Bolingbroke of whatever credit was his for the Peace of Utrecht, and that was not a little; certainly more than may be given to Oxford.