Whole nights on her unwearied arm sustain,

And charm away the sense of pain :

Nor did she crown your mutual flame

With pledges dear, and with a father's tender name.

How in the world, to me a desert grown,

Abandon'd and alone,

Without my sweet companion can I live?

Without her lovely smile,

The dear reward of every virtuous toil,

What pleasures now can pall'd Ambition give?

One would wish to think that Lord Lyttelton was faithful to the memory of his Lucy: but he was neither more nor less than man; and in the impatience of grief, or unable to live without that domestic happiness to which his charming wife had accustomed him, he married again, about two years after her death, and too precipitately. His second choice was Elizabeth Rich, eldest daughter of Sir Robert Rich. Perhaps he expected too much; and how few women could have replaced Lucy Fortescue! The experiment

proved a most unfortunate one, and added bitterness to his regrets. He devoted the rest of his life to politics and literature.

About ten years after his second marriage, Lord Lyttelton made a tour into Wales with a gay party. On some occasion, while they stood contemplating a scene of uncommon picturesque beauty, he turned to a friend, and asked him, with enthusiasm, whether it was possible to behold a more pleasing sight? Yes, answered the other the countenance of the woman one loves! Lord Lyttelton shrunk, as if probed to the quick; and after a moment's silence, replied pensively-" once, I thought so!” *

Lord Lyttelton brings to mind his friend and patron, Frederick Prince of Wales (grandfather of the present King). From the impression which history has given of his character, no one, I believe, would suspect him of being a poet, though he was known as the patron of poets. He sometimes amused himself with writing French and English songs, &c. in imitation of the Regent

* Lord Lyttelton's Works, 4to.

Duc d'Orleans. But, assuredly, it was not in imitation of the Regent he chose his own wife for the principal subject of his ditties. In the same manner, and in the same worthy spirit of imitation of the same worthy person, he tried hard to be a libertine, and laid siege to the virtue of sundry maids of honour; preferring all the time, in his inmost soul, his own wife to the handsomest among her attendants. His flirtations with Lady

Archibald Hamilton and Miss Vane had not half the grace or sincerity of some of his effusions to the Princess, whom he tenderly loved, and used to call, with a sort of pastoral gallantry, "ma Sylvie." One of his songs has been preserved by that delicious retailer of court-gossip, Horace Walpole; and I copy it from the Appendix to his Memoirs, without agreeing in his flippant

censure.

SONG.

'Tis not the languid brightness of thine eyes,
That swim with pleasure and delight,

Nor those fair heavenly arches which arise

O'er each of them, to shade their light :

"Tis not that hair which plays with every wind,

And loves to wanton o'er thy face,

Now straying o'er thy forehead, now behind

Retiring with insidious grace:

'Tis not the living colours over each,

By Nature's finest pencil wrought,

To shame the fresh-blown rose and blooming peach,

And mock the happiest painter's thought;

But 'tis that gentle mind, that ardent love

So kindly answering my desire,

That grace with which you look, and speak, and move!
That thus have set my soul on fire.

To Dr. Parnell's* love for his wife (Anne Minchin), we owe two of the most charming songs in our language; "My life hath been so wondrous free," and that most beautiful lyric, "When your beauty appears," which, as it is less known, I give entire,

When your beauty appears

In its graces and airs,

All bright as an angel new dropt from the skies,

At distance I gaze, and am aw'd by my fears,

So strangely you dazzle my eyes.

Born in Dublin, 1679; died 1717.

But when without art,

Your kind thoughts you impart,

When your love runs in blushes through every vein;

When it darts from your eyes, when it pants at your

heart,

Then I know that you're woman again.

"There's a passion and pride,

In our sex," she replied;

"And thus, might I gratify both, I would do,

Still an angel appear to each lover beside,

But still be a woman for you!"

This amiable and beloved wife died after a union of five or six years, and left her husband broken-hearted. Her sweetness and loveliness, and the general sympathy caused by her death, drew a touch of deep feeling from the pen of Swift, who mentions the event in his journal to Stella: every one, he says, grieved for her husband, "they were so happy together." Poor Parnell did not, in his bereavement, try Lord Lyttelton's specifics he did not write an elegy, nor a monody, nor did he marry again;—and, unfortunately for himself, he could not subdue his mind