his friend and neighbour, George Lyttelton, of Hagley Park. The son of Sir Thomas Lyttelton, he was born in 1709, and was educated first at Eton, where he distinguished himself in scholarship, and afterwards at Christ Church, Oxford, to which he was admitted on the 11th of February 1726. After residing there for about three years he went abroad and travelled in Italy and France. His first published poem, Blenheim, which appeared in 1728, was written at Oxford. On his return from his travels he published in 1732 his Progress of Love and in 1735 his Persian Letters, but in the latter year his attention was diverted to politics, and he was sent to Parliament as M.P. for Okehampton. He now became one of the leading members of the Opposition, and made himself conspicuous by his declamations against Walpole's corrupt methods of administration, who in return was accustomed to jeer at him and Pitt as "the Boys." Becoming secretary to Frederick Prince of Wales in 1737, he persuaded the latter to aim at popularity as a patron of literature, and above all to enlist the services of Pope. With that great poet he was on terms of intimacy, and was praised by him both for his own virtues as an ardent patriot, and as the secretary of a future "Patriot King." In 1742 he married Lucy, daughter of Hugh Fortescue of Filleigh, Devonshire, but lost his wife, to whom he was fondly attached, and whose memory is preserved in his Monody, in January 1746-7. Her death may have caused a change in his religious convictions, for having hitherto inclined to the free-thinking opinions of Bolingbroke, he published, in 1747, his Observations on the Conversion of St. Paul, signalising thereby his adherence to the dogmas of the Christian faith. On the 10th of August 1749 he married, for his second wife, the daughter of Sir Robert Rich, and in 1751, on the death of his father, he succeeded to the baronetcy. For a short time he held, in 1755, the Chancellorship of the Exchequer in the Duke of Newcastle's Ministry; but he did not retain office under Pitt, though in 1756 he was raised to the peerage for his services. He henceforth devoted himself mainly to literature, publishing his Dialogues of the Dead in 1760, and his History of Henry II. between 1767 and 1771. He died on the 22nd of August 1773, and was buried at Hagley. Besides the mention of Lyttelton by Pope, his name is closely associated, as a friend, with those of Gilbert West and Shenstone, and, as a patron, with that of Thomson. It is in the excellent prologue to Thomson's Coriolanus, produced after the poet's death, that Lyttelton's best-remembered verse occurs, in which he says that Thomson left behind him not One line which, dying, he could wish to blot. His own place among the English poets is due much more to the influence which he exercised on others, through his taste and character, than to his original productions. Lord Waldegrave says of him :— Sir George Lyttelton was an enthusiast in religion and politics; absent in business; not ready in a debate: and totally ignorant of the world.1 It might have been added that he was also an enthusiast in literature. Full of generous feeling, he had not enough of original thought to let his personality penetrate through the forms of conventional expression. He is always an imitator; yet his work is of interest, as showing how strongly the social tendency to "natureworship" was influencing Englishmen of education and accomplishment, who had been brought up within the strict limits of classical reserve. The following pathetic stanza from his Monody, which was much admired by Gray, may illustrate this remark : In vain I look around O'er all the well-known ground, My Lucy's wonted footsteps to descry! Where oft in tender talk We saw the summer sun go down the sky. 1 Memoirs, p. 25. 2 Letter to Wharton, 30th Nov. 1747, and to Walpole, letter without date in 1747. Nor by yon fountain's side, Nor where its waters glide Along the valley can she now be found, In all the wide-stretched prospect's ample bound : No more my mournful eye Can aught of her espy, But the sad sacred earth where her dear relics lie. 33 And in the lines addressed To Mr. West at Wickham, we see Lyttelton's appreciation of the "simplicity praised by Shenstone, expressed without Shenstone's artificiality : Fair Nature's sweet simplicity With elegance refined, Well in thy seat, my friend, I see, But better in thy mind. To both from courts and all their state Eager I fly, to prove Joys far above a courtier's fate, Tranquillity and love.1 From Pastoralism and Elegy it is an easy step to Lyric verse. As the former poetical tendency signified a revival of the rural instincts of that feudal England which had been more or less overlaid by the coffee-house habits and town tastes encouraged by the Revolution of 1688; so the latter implied something of a reaction on behalf of sentiment and imagination against the ethical reasoning which, as we have seen, carried along the genius of Pope almost in his own despite. The public (says Joseph Warton in the prefatory note to his Odes on Various Subjects, published in 1746,) has been so much accustomed of late to didactic poetry alone, and essays on moral subjects, that any work where the imagination is much indulged will perhaps not be relished or regarded. The author, therefore, of these pieces is in some pain lest certain austere critics shall think them too fanciful and descriptive. But as he is convinced that the fashion of moralising in verse has been carried too far, and as he looks upon Invention and Imagination to be the chief faculties of a Poet, so he will be happy if the following Odes may be looked upon as an attempt to bring back poetry into its right channel. 1 See p. 270. From the key-note thus struck was developed that futile, but rather mischievous, line of argument, to prove that Pope was not a "poetical" poet, which, proceeding through the latter half of the eighteenth century, was brought to a wearisome climax in the dispute between Bowles, Byron, and others, in the second decade of the nineteenth. The protagonists of the new lyrical movement were Joseph and Thomas Warton, the sons of Thomas Warton, Professor of Poetry at Oxford during the years 1728-38, and Vicar of Basingstoke, himself a writer of verse, which here and there foreshadows the romantic tendencies of the family in the next generation. Joseph was born at Dunsfold, Surrey, in 1722. He was educated first at the Basingstoke Grammar School, from which in 1735 he was elected scholar at Winchester, proceeding thence on the 16th of January 1739-40 to Oriel College, Oxford. He graduated as B.A. on the 13th of March 1743-44, and became curate to his father at Basingstoke in 1746. In 1746, the same year that Collins brought out his Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects, Warton published a volume containing his Odes on Various Subjects, together with other poems, among which was The Enthusiast. The odes are not remarkable, but The Enthusiast is noteworthy, as being perhaps the earliest deliberate expression in England (for it is said to have been written in 1740) of the feeling in which the Romantic movement originated. The writer, in a passage of classico-mythological imagery, declares his preference for Shakespeare's "native woodnote wild" over the "correct" compositions of his own century : What are the lays of artful Addison, Coldly correct, to Shakespeare's warblings wild? Oft soothed his wondering ears with deep delight: It is entertaining to note the visions of a Golden Age with which the future respectable headmaster of Winchester indulged his youthful fancy: Happy the first of men, ere yet confined To smoky cities; who in sheltering groves, They gathered grateful, or the acorn brown, Of murmuring waters called to slake their thirst. Then doors and walls were not; the melting maid O whither, God of raptures, art thou fled, Prepares with baneful drugs t'enchant the soul? And it is yet more interesting, as evidence of the continuity in the Romantic Movement, to observe how the somewhat grotesque aspirations of The Enthusiast anticipate the Rousseau-inspired resolutions of the lover in Locksley Hall : O who will bear me then to western climes, To isles of innocence from mortal view Deeply retired, beneath a platane's shade, The boar and tiger through savannahs wild, Through fragrant deserts, and through citron groves? Of narrow-hearted avarice, nor heed The distant din of the tumultuous world. Joseph did not realise his poetic dream. In 1748 he was appointed to the Rectory of Winslade, and was in |