tion was found alive, and with some difficulty reared. At Eton school, where he was educated, he was so much distinguished that his exercises were recommended as models to his school-fellows. From Eton he went to Christ Church, where he retained the same reputation of superiority, and displayed his abilities to the public in a poem on Blenheim. He was a very early writer, both in verse and prose; his "Progress of Love," and his "Persian Letters," having both been written when he was very young. After a short residence at Oxford, he began his travels in 1728, and visited France and Italy. From Rome he sent those elegant verses which are prefixed to the works of Pope, whom he consulted in 1730 respecting his four pastorals. Pope made some alterations in them, which may be seen in Bowles's late edition of that poet's works (vol. IV. p. 139). We find Pope, a few years afterwards, in a letter to Swift, speak thus of him: He is "one of those whom his own merit has forced me to contract an intimacy with, after I had sworn never to love a man more, since the sorrow it cost me to have loved so many now dead, banished, or unfortunate, I mean Mr. Lyttelton, one of the worthiest of the rising generation," &c. In another letter Mr. Lyttelton is mentioned in a manner with which Dr. Warton says he was displeased *.

When he returned from his continental tour, he was (May 4, 1729) made page of honour to the princess royal. He also obtained a seat in parliament, and soon distinguished himself among the most eager opponents of sir Robert Walpole, though his father, who was one of the lords of the admiralty, always voted with the court. For many years the name of George Lyttelton was seen in every account of every debate in the house of commons. Among the great leading questions, he opposed the standing army, and the excise, and supported the motion for petitioning the king to remove Walpole. The prince of Wales having, in consequence of a quarrel with the king, been obliged to leave St. James's in 1737, kept a separate court, and opened his arms to the opponents of the ministry. Mr. Lyttelton was made his secretary, and was upposed to have great influence in the direction of his conduct. His name consequently occurs, although not very often, in Doddington's Diary. He persuaded the

Pope's Works, vol. IX. Letter LXXXV.

prince, whose business it was now to be popular, that he would advance his character by patronage. Mallet was made under-secretary, with 200l. a year; and Thomson had a pension of 100l. The disposition of the two men must account for the difference in the sums. Mallet could do more political service than the honest-hearted Thomson. For Thomson, however, Mr. Lyttelton always retained his kindness, and was able at last to place him at ease. Moore courted his favour by an apologetical poem called "The Trial of Selim," and was paid with kind words, which, as is common, says Dr. Johnson, raised great hopes, that at last were disappointed. This matter, however, is differently stated in our account of Moore.

Mr. Lyttelton now stood in the first rank of opposition; and Pope, who was incited, it is not easy to say how, to increase the clamour against the ministry, commended him among the other patriots. This drew upon him the reproaches of Mr. Henry Fox, who, in the House of Commons, was weak enough to impute to him as a crime his intimacy with a lampooner so unjust and licentious. Lyttelton supported his friend, and replied, "that he thought it an honour to be received into the familiarity of so great a poet." While he was thus conspicuous, he married (1741) Miss Lucy Fortescue, sister to Matthew lord Fortescue, of Devonshire, by whom he had a son, Thomas, and two daughters, and with whom he appears to have lived in the highest degree of connubial felicity: but human pleasures are short; she died in childbed about six years afterwards (1747); and he solaced his grief by writing a "Monody" to her memory, without, however, con

This notice of the Monody, which is given in Dr. Johnson's words, has been thought too scanty praise. In truth, it is no praise at all, but an assertion, and not a just one, that lord Lyttelton "solaced his grief" by writing the poem. The praise or blame was usually reserved by Johnson for the conclusion of his lives, but in this case the Monody is not mentioned at all. We have on record, however, an opinion of Gray, which the admirers of the poem will perhaps scarcely think more sympathetic than Johnson's silence. In a letter to lord Orford, who had probably spoken with disrespect of the Monody, Gray says, "I am not totally of your mind as to Mr.

Lyttelton's elegy, though I love kids and fauns as little as you do. If it were all like the fourth stanza, I should be excessively pleased. Nature and sorrow and tenderness are the true genius of such things; and something of these I find in several parts of it (not in the orange tree): poetical ornaments are foreign to the purpose, for they only show a man is not sorry -and devotion worse; for it teaches him that he ought not to be sorry, which is all the pleasure of the thing."

Orford's Works, vol. V. p. 389. Dr. Johnson is undoubtedly ironical in saying that the author "solaced his grief' by writing the Monody. The poet's grief must have abated, and his mind

demning himself to perpetual solitude and sorrow; for soon after he sought to find the same happiness again in a second marriage with the daughter of sir Robert Rich (1749); but the experiment was unsuccessful, and he was for some years before his death separated from this lady. "She was," says Gilbert West in a letter to Dr. Doddridge, "an intimate and dear friend of his former wife, which is some kind of proof of her merit; I mean of the goodness of her heart, for that is the chief merit which Mr. Lyttelton esteems; and I hope she will not in this disappoint his expectations; in all other points she is well suited to him; being extremely well accomplished in languages, music, painting, &c. very sensible, and well bred." This lady died Sept. 17, 1795.

When, after a long struggle, Walpole gave way, and honour and profit were distributed among his conquerors, Lyttelton was made in (1744) one of the lords of the treasury; and from that time was engaged in supporting the schemes of ministry. Politics did not, however, so much engage him as to withhold his thoughts from things of more importance. He had, in the pride of juvenile confidence, with the help of corrupt conversation, entertained doubts of the truth of Christianity; but he thought the time now come when it was no longer fit to doubt or believe by chance, and applied himself seriously to the great question. His studies being honest, ended in conviction. He found that Religion was true, and what he had learned he endeavoured to teach, by "Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of St. Paul," printed in 1747; a treatise to which infidelity has never been able to fabricate a specious answer. This book his father had the happiness of seeing, and expressed his pleasure in a letter which deserves to be inserted, and must have given to such a son a pleasure more easily conceived than described: "I have read your religious treatise with infinite pleasure and satisfaction. The style is fine and clear, the arguments close, cogent, and irresistible. May the King of kings, whose glorious cause you have so well defended, reward your pious labours, and grant that I may be found worthy, through the

recovered its tone before he could write at all; and when this became Mr. Lyttelton's case, he felt it his duty to pay an affectionate tribute to the memory of his lady, who certainly was one of the best of women. His talents

led him to do this in poetry, and he no more deserves the suspicion of hypocrisy, than if he had, as an artist, painted an apotheosis, or executed a

monument.

merits of Jesus Christ, to be an eye-witness of that happi ness which I don't doubt He will bountifully bestow upon you! In the mean time, I shall never cease glorifying God, for having endowed you with such useful talents, and given me so good a son. Your affectionate father, THOMAS LYTTELTON."-When the university of Oxford conferred the degree of LL. D. on Mr. West for his excellent work on the "Resurrection," the same honour is said to have been offered to our author for the above piece, but he declined it, in a handsome manner, by saying that he chose not to be under any particular attachments, that, if he should happen to write any thing of the like kind for the future, it might not appear to proceed from any other motive whatsoever, but a pure desire of doing good.

A few years afterwards, in 1751, by the death of his father, be inherited the title of baronet, with a large estate, which, though perhaps he did not augment, he was careful to adorn, by a house of great elegance and expence, and by much attention to the decoration of his park at Hagley. As he continued his exertions in parliament, he was gradually advancing his claim to profit and preferment; and accordingly was made in 1754 cofferer and privy-counsellor. This place he exchanged next year for that of chancellor of the exchequer, an office, however, that required some qualifications which he soon perceived himself to want. It is an anecdote no less remarkable than true, that he never could comprehend the commonest rules of arithmetic. The year after, his curiosity led him into Wales; of which he has given an account, perhaps rather with too much affectation of delight, to Archibald Bower, a man of whom he had conceived an opinion more favourable than he seems to have deserved, and whom, having once espoused his interest and fame, he never was persuaded to disown. It must indeed have proceeded from a strong conviction of Bower's innocence, however acquired, that such a man as Lyttelton adhered to him to the very last. About 1755, he prevented Garrick from bringing Bower on the stage in the character of a mock convert, to be shewn in various attitudes, in which the profligacy of his conduct was to be exposed: and a very few years before his own death, he declared to the celebrated Dr. Lardner his opinion of Bower in these words, "I have no more doubt of his having continued a firm protestant to the last hour of his life, than I have of my not being a papist myself."

About this time he published his "Dialogues of the Dead," which were very eagerly read, though the production rather, as it seems, of leisure than of study, rather effusions than compositions. When, in the latter part of the last reign, the inauspicious commencement of the war made the dissolution of the ministry unavoidable, sir George Lyttelton, losing his employment with the rest, was raised to the peerage, Nov. 19, 1757, by the title of lord Lyttelton, baron of Frankley, in the county of Worcester. His last literary production was, "The History of Henry the Second," 1764, elaborated by the researches and deliberations of twenty years, and published with the greatest anxiety, which Dr. Johnson, surely very improperly, ascribes to vanity. The story of the publication, however, we allow to be remarkable. The whole work was printed twice over, greatest part of it three times, and many sheets four or five times. The booksellers paid for the first impression †; but the charges and repeated alterations of the press were at the expence of the author, whose ambitious accuracy is known to have cost him at least a thousand pounds. He began to print in 1755. Three volumes appeared in 1764; a second edition of them in 1767; a third edition in 1768; and the conclusion in 1771. Andrew Reid, a man not without considerable abilities, and not unacquainted with letters or with life, undertook to persuade the noble author, as he had persuaded himself, that he was master of the secret of punctuation; and, as fear begets credulity, he was employed, we know not at what price, to point the pages of "Henry the Second," as if, said Johnson once in conversation, "another man could point his sense better than himself." The book, however,

The copy was all transcribed by his lordship's own hand, and that not a very legible one, as he acknowledges in a letter to his printer. See Nichols's Bowyer.

This fact is undoubtedly true. We shall not scruple, however, to add to it a trifling circumstance, which shews that the excellent peer (whose finances were not in the most flourishing situation) could bear with great fortitude what by many would have been deemed an insult. The booksellers, at a stated period, had paid the stationer for as much paper as they had agreed to purchase. His lordship then became the paymaster; in which state

the work went on for some years, till the stationer, having been disappointed of an expected sum, refused to furnish any more paper. With great reluct ance Mr. Bowyer was prevailed on to carry this report to his lordship; and began the tale with much hesitation."Oh! I understand you," says his lordship very calmly, "the man afraid to trust me! I acknowledge I am poor, and so are two thirds of the House of Peers; but let me request you to be my security." It is needless to add, that Mr. Bowyer obliged his lordship, and had no reason to repent of the civility.