You are now grown big enough to be a man, if you can be wise enough; for the way to be truly wise is to serve God, learn your book, and observe the instructions of your parents first, and next your tutor, to whom I have entirely resigned you for this seven years, and according as you employ that time, you are to be happy or unhappy for ever; but I have so good an opinion of you, that I am glad to think you will never deceive me; dear child, learn your book and be obedient, and you shall see what a father I will be to you. You shall want no pleasure while you are good, and that you may be so are my constant prayers.

"ROCHESTER."

"Charles, I take it very kindly that you write me, though seldom, and wish heartily you would behave yourself so as that I might show how much I love you without being ashamed. Obedience to your grandmother, and those who instruct you in good things, is the way to make you happy here and for ever. Avoid idleness, scorn lying, and God will bless you.

Such was this brilliant man of fashion, in his happier and worthier moods, and under the purifying influence of the sweet Home affections.*

* Dr. Johnson, "Lives of the Poets," sub voce; "Poems by Earl of Rochester," ed. 1691; "Some Passages in the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester," by Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury (1680); Pepys' "Diary;" Evelyn, "Diary;" etc., etc.

George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham.

The pseudo-romance attaching to the career of this splendid but wayward noble has given him a remarkable place in our literature. It has been his strange fortune to have had his memory preserved by the genius of Dryden, Pope, and Scott. It cannot be said that the portraits they have drawn present him in flattering colours, but they have seized the popular imagination, so that it may well be doubted whether George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, is not the best known of all the figures that played their parts in the tragi-comedy of Charles the Second's reign. Before we attempt a sketch of his life we shall bring together these skilfully elaborated" characters" of the brilliant Duke, together with some other notices, showing the light in which historians have agreed to regard him.

Everybody knows that he is the Zimri of Dryden's "Absalom and Achitophel," and in that fine satire no other portrait is drawn with more care or point. It has all the terseness of an epigram; its compact and vigorous couplets make themselves remembered; and their irresistible force leaves us no time to doubt their truth:

"Some of their chiefs were princes of the land;

In the first rank of these did Zimri stand:

A man so various, that he seemed to be
Not one, but all mankind's epitome:
Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong;
Was everything by starts, and nothing long;
But, in the course of one revolving moon,
Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon:
Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking,
Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking.
Blest madman, who could every hour employ
With something new to wish or to enjoy!
Railing and praising were his usual themes;
And both, to show his judgment, in extremes:

So over-violent, or over-civil,

That every man with him was God or Devil.

In squandering wealth was his peculiar art:
Nothing went unrewarded but desert.

Beggared by fools, whom still he found too late;

He had his jest, and they had his estate.

He laughed himself from court; then sought relief
By forming parties, but could ne'er be brief:

For, spite of him, the weight of business fell
On Absalom and wise Achitophel: *

Thus, wicked but in will, of means bereft,

He left not faction, but of that was left."

Not less finished is Pope's antithetical description of the mean and obscure death of the once brilliant Duke :

"In the worst inn's worst room, with mat half-hung,

The floors of plaster, and the walls of dung,
On once a flock-bed, but repaired with straw,
With tape-tied curtains, never meant to draw,
The George and Garter dangling from that bed
Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red,
Great Villiers lies-alas! how changed from him,
That life of pleasure and that soul of whim!
Gallant and gay, in Cliveden's proud alcove,
The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love;
Or just as gay at council, in a ring

Of mimic statesmen and their merry King.
No wit to flatter, left of all his store!
No fool to laugh at, which he valued more—
There, victor of his health, of fortune, friends,
And fame, this lord of useless thousands ends!"

Says Horace Walpole, speaking of the Duke:-" His portrait has been drawn by four masterly hands: Burnet has hewn it out with his rough chisel-Count Hamilton touched it with that slight delicacy that finishes while it seems but to sketch-Dryden catched the living likeness -Pope completed the historical resemblance." He has also attempted it himself:-" When this extraordinary man," he says, "with the figure and genius of Alcibiades, could *"Absalom: " the Duke of Monmouth. "Achitophel:" the Earl of Shaftesbury.

equally charm the presbyterian Fairfax and the dissolute Charles; when he alike ridiculed that witty King and his solemn Chancellor; when he plotted the ruin of his country with a cabal of bad ministers, or, equally unprincipled, supported its cause with bad patriots, one laments that such parts should have been devoid of any virtue. But when Alcibiades turns chemist; when he is a real bubble and a visionary miser; when ambition is but a frolic; when the worst designs are for the foolishest ends, contempt extinguishes all reflections on his character."

Bishop Burnet describes him as "a man of noble presence. He had a great liveliness of wit, and a peculiar faculty of turning all things into ridicule, with bold figures, and natural descriptions. He had no sort of literature, only he was drawn into chemistry; and for some years he thought he was very near the finding of the philosopher's stone, which had the effect that attends on all such men as he was, when they are drawn in to lay out for it. He had no principles of religion, virtue, or friendship; pleasure, frolic, or extravagant diversion was all that he laid to heart. He was true to nothing; He had no steadiness nor

for he was not true to himself.

conduct; he could keep no secret, nor execute any design without spoiling it. He could never fix his thoughts, nor govern his estate, though then the greatest in England. He was bred about the King, and for many years he had a great ascendant over him; but he spake of him to all persons with that contempt, that at last he drew a lasting disgrace upon himself. And he at length ruined both body and mind, fortune and reputation equally. The madness of vice appeared in his person in very eminent instances; since at last be became contemptible and poor,

sickly, and sunk in his parts, as well as in all other respects; so that his conversation was as much avoided as ever it had been courted."

In still blacker colours the unfortunate Duke is painted by Butler, the author of "Hudibras," who thus revenged himself upon a man he hated:-" The Duke of Bucks," he says, "is one that has studied the whole body of vice. His parts are disproportionate to the whole; and, like a monster, he has more of some, and less of others, than he should have. He has pulled down all that nature raised in him, and built himself up again after a model of his own. He has dammed up all those lights that nature made into the noblest prospects of the world, and opened other little blind loop-holes backward, by turning day into night, and night into day. His appetite to his pleasures is diseased and crazy, like the pica in a woman, that longs to eat that which was never made for food, or a girl in the green sickness, that eats chalk and mortar. Perpetual surfeits of pleasure have filled his mind with bad and vicious humours (as well as his body with a nursery of diseases), which makes him affect new and extravagant ways, as being sick and tired with the old. Continual wine, women, and music put false values upon things, which, by custom, become habitual, and debauch his understanding so, that he retains no right notion nor sense of things. And as the same dose of the same physic has no operation on those that are much used to it; so his pleasures require a larger proportion of excess and variety, to render him sensible of them. He rises, eats, and goes to bed by the Julian account, long after all others that go by the new style, and keeps the same hours with owls and the antipodes. He is a great

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