Excerpt from Our Old Nobility The censure is qualified by a few lines of praise, eulogising Shaftesbury as an incorruptible Judge in an age when Judges were notoriously venal. But these lines were only inserted in the second edition, and there is too much reason to believe that they were inserted for a handsome considera tion at the instance of Shaftesbury himself. Though Dryden was a Court poet, and Shaftesbury Leader of the Opposition, the former was not far wrong in his estimate of the Achito phel of the Restoration, according to Lord Campbell. Macaulay says that he was one of the men in whom the immorality which was epidemic among the politicians of that age appeared in its most malignant type, and that he had served and betrayed a succession of Governments, but he had timed all his treacheries so well that through all revolutions his fortunes had been constantly rising. He has the dubious honour of having been a Lord Chancellor with scarcely any knowledge of law. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.