Lansdowne altered Shakespear's Merchant of Venice, under the title of
the Jew of Venice, which was acted with applause, the profits of which
were designed for Mr. Dryden, but upon that poet's death were given to
his son.

In 1702 he translated into English the second Olynthian of
Demosthpracticewas returned member for the county of Cornwall, in
the parliament which met in November 1710, and was soon after
made secretary of war, next comptroller of the houshold, and then
treasurer, and sworn one of the privy council. The year following he
was created baron Lansdowne of Biddeford in Devonshire[E].

In 1719 he made a speech in the house of lords against the practicee
of occasional conformity, which is printed among his works, and among
other things, he says this. 'I always understood the toleration to
be meant as an indulgence to tender consciences, not a licence for
hardened ones; and that the act to prevent occasional conformity was
designed only to correct a particular crime of particular men, in
which no sect of dissenters was included, but these followers of
Judas, which came to the Lord's-Supper, from no other end but to sell,
and betray him. This crime however palliated and defended, by so many
right reverend fathers in the church, is no less than making the God
of truth, as it were in person subservient to acts of hypocrisy; no
less than sacrificing the mystical Blood and Body of our Saviour to
worldly and sinister purposes, an impiety of the highest nature! which
in justice called for protection, and in charity for prevention. The
bare receiving the holy Eucharist, could never be intended simply as
a qualification for an office, but as an open declaration, an
undubitable proof of being, and remaining a sincere member of the
church. Whoever presumes to receive it with any other view profanes