Dr Johnson said once of Chesterfield, 'I thought him a lord among wits,
but I find him to be only a wit among lords.' And so we may say of Lord
Lyttelton, 'He is a poet among lords, if not a lord among poets.' He was
the son of Sir Thomas Lyttelton, of Hagley in Worcestershire, and was
born in 1709. He went to Eton and Oxford, where he distinguished himself.
Having gone the usual grand tour, he entered Parliament, and became an
opponent of Sir Robert Walpole. He was made secretary to the Prince of
Wales, and was in this capacity useful to Mallett and Thomson. In 1741,
he married Lucy Fortescue, of Devonshire, who died five years afterwards.
Lyttelton grieved sincerely for her, and wrote his affecting 'Monody' on
the subject. When his party triumphed, he was created a Lord of the
Treasury, and afterwards Chancellor of the Exchequer, with a peerage. He
employed much of his leisure in literary composition, writing a good
little book on the Conversion of St Paul, a laboured History of Henry II.,
and some verses, including the stanza in the 'Castle of Indolence'
describing Thomson--
'A bard there dwelt, more fat than bard beseems,' &c.--
and a very spirited prologue to Thomson's 'Coriolanus,' which was written
after that author's death, and says of him,
--'His chaste muse employed her heaven-taught lyre
None but the noblest passions to inspire:
Not one immoral, one corrupted thought,
_One line which, dying he could wish to blot_.'
Lyttelton himself died August 22, 1773, aged sixty-four. His History is
now little read. It took him, it is said, thirty years to write it, and
he employed another man to point it--a fact recalling what is told of
Macaulay, that he sent the first volume of his 'History of England' to
Lord Jeffrey, who overlooked the punctuation and criticised the style.
Of a series of Dialogues issued by this writer, Dr Johnson remarked,
with his usual pointed severity, 'Here is a man telling the world what
the world had all his life been telling him.' His 'Monody' expresses
real grief in an artificial style, but has some stanzas as natural in
the expression as they are pathetic in the feeling.