'Nothing to Be Despised'

“But to politicks and literature there must be an end.” 

Leave it to Dr. Johnson to remind us of the vanity of our wishes. Human striving often comes to little or nothing. Above he writes of a poet whose posthumous place in English literature seems to confirm Johnson’s dismissive verdict. Perhaps a few eighteenth-century scholars still read the poetry of George Lyttelton. I know him almost exclusively through Johnson’s brief biography in The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, most of which is devoted to Lyttelton’s public life as a Member of Parliament and Chancellor of the Exchequer, not his work as a poet.

 

Johnson speaks well of a single poem by Lyttleton, “Advice to Belinda,” also known as “Advice to a Lady.” It “contains,” he writes, “much truth and much prudence, very elegantly and vigorously expressed, and shews a mind attentive to life, and a power of poetry which cultivation might have raised to excellence.” Note the qualification. Lyttelton writes:

 

“Hard is the fortune that your sex attends;

Women, like Princes, find few real friends:

All who approach them their own ends pursue:

Lovers and ministers seldom are true.”

 

Even the praise is lukewarm. He writes: “Lord Lyttelton’s Poems are the works of a man of literature and judgment, devoting part of his time to versification. They have nothing to be despised, and little to be admired. . . . His little performances, whether Songs or Epigrams, are sometimes spritely, and sometimes insipid. His epistolary pieces have a smooth equability, which cannot much tire, because they are short, but which seldom elevates or surprizes.”

 

Lyttleton was born in 1709 and died on this date, August 22, in 1773 at age sixty-four.