Lord George Lyttelton (1709–73), son of Sir Thomas Lyttelton of Hagley in Worcestershire, entered parliament in 1730, soon acquired eminence as a speaker, held several high political offices, and was raised to the peerage in 1759. His poetry gained him a place in Johnson’s “Lives of the Poets;” his best-known prose works are on “The Conversion and Apostleship of St. Paul” (1747), “Dialogues of the Dead” (1760), and “History of Henry II” (1764). See “Memoirs and Correspondence” (1845).

Personal

  As disagreeable as his figure was, his voice was still more so, and his address more disagreeable than either.

  Sir George Lyttelton was an enthusiast both in religion and politics; absent in business, not ready in a debate, and totally ignorant of the world: on the other hand, his studied orations were excellent; he was a man of parts, a scholar, no indifferent writer, and by far the honestest man of the whole society.

  Sir George Lyttelton and Legge were as opposite in their manners; the latter concise and pointed, the former diffuse and majestic. Legge’s speeches seemed the heads of chapters to Sir George Lyttelton’s dissertations.

  Pedantry was so deeply fixed in his nature, that the hustings, the treasury, the exchequer, the House of Commons, the House of Lords, left him the same dreaming schoolboy that they found him.

  His natural abilities were good; and though not of the highest order, were continually strengthened by careful and unremitting cultivation. His ambition of improvement, springing from a deep sense of the obligations which wealth and station imposes upon their possessor, was constant to the hour of his death—to press forward in the pursuit of knowledge, not diverted from the chase by early success and extravagant admiration of moderate efforts: “to scorn delights, and live laborious days,” had been the occupation of his life. Its fruit was visible in the variety of his accomplishments, and the fullness of his information upon the subjects to which he had devoted himself. During the course of his life he had maintained an oral or epistolary intercourse with the most celebrated persons of his day, both in England and Europe. Making ample allowance for the language of cotemporaneous flattery, it is impossible to ascribe to that alone the very general estimation in which his opinions were held by all who had any pretensions to almost any kind of literature. Nor indeed is the verdict of posterity greatly at variance with the judgment of his own time. Of how few can it be said that they have left behind them works in History, Poetry, and Divinity, which, after the lapse of nearly a century, maintain an honourable place in the literature of their country? And of how very few, that they combined with success in these pursuits a laborious and distinguished share in the duties of public life?

  Lyttelton, who is known as “the good Lord Lyttelton,” was an amiable, absent-minded man, of unimpeachable integrity and benevolent character, with strong religious convictions and respectable talents. In spite of his “great abilities for set debates and solemn questions,” his ignorance of the world and his unreadiness in debate made him a poor practical politician. In appearance he was thin and lanky, with a meagre face and an awkward carriage…. Lyttelton was a liberal patron of literature…. His friendship with Pope … formed the subject of an attack upon him in the House of Commons.

Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of Saint Paul, 1747

  I have read your religious treatise with infinite pleasure and satisfaction. The style is fine and clear, the arguments close, cogent, and irresistible. May the King of kings, whose glorious cause you have so well defended, reward your pious labours, and grant that I may be found worthy, through the merits of Jesus Christ, to be an eye-witness of that happiness which I don’t doubt he will bountifully bestow upon you! In the meantime, I shall never cease glorifying God for having endowed you with such useful talents and giving me so good a son. Your affectionate father.

  The great advantage of this performance is, that the evidence for Christianity is here drawn to one point of view, for the use of those who will not attend to a long series of argument. The design is to show, that the conversion and apostleship of St. Paul, alone considered, is, of itself, a demonstration sufficient to prove Christianity to be a divine revelation. This design is very happily executed.

  Lord Lyttleton has discussed the most illustrious instance of the conversion to this religion, in the person of St. Paul, a man of the highest natural talents and of the profoundest reasoning and erudition; and he has accompanied the whole with remarks of weight and dignity on the general subject of Revelation.

  He successfully shows that St. Paul was not an impostor nor an enthusiast and that he could not have been deceived himself. From all which, his lordship infers the certainty of his conversion and call to the apostleship, and, consequently, the divine origin of the gospel. It is a well-reasoned and acute pamphlet, and discovers considerable acquaintance with the Scriptures.

Dialogues of the Dead, 1760–62

  Were very eagerly read, though the production rather, as it seems, of leisure than of study;—rather effusions than compositions. The names of his persons too often enable the reader to anticipate their conversation; and, when they have met, they too often part without any conclusion. He has copied Fenelon more than Fontenelle.

King Henry II., 1764–67

  I think your Lordship will have a great deal of pleasure in reading Lord Lyttleton’s History. You will like to see a Gothic building by a Roman architect. The story is Gothic, but expressed with majesty, gravity and force, without anything dark or rude, or perplexed and confused.

  Lyttleton’s “Henry II.” is a learned and honest book.

  Lord Lyttelton, in his “Life of Henry the Second,” goes through a very candid and temperate inquiry into this question; and he thinks the Commons was originally a part of the national council or Parliament. The strongest evidence he produces is drawn from the two celebrated instances of the petitions sent, one by the borough of St. Alban’s, the other by Barnstaple.

  The subject of it is well chosen, the arrangement is good, and the style clear. The great bulk of it is still useful; and an addition which should retrench some superfluities, correct some inaccuracies, and embody the pith of the best recent works on the same subjects, would be a standard book for every student of English or general mediæval history.

  The work was, in fact, highly instructive, learned, careful, and accurate, but like many another of that description, wanted the crowning touch of genius to give it lasting importance. Its whole plan and form was tedious and uninviting. Lyttleton had pursued, through five dreary volumes, the life of a king who had been long forgotten by the public, and whose reign, with one or two striking episodes, had been dull and unimportant. His work is as long as the whole of Hume’s History of England, and while that graceful writer had condensed in a few pages the Life of Henry II., Lyttleton gave to one reign labor and space sufficient for the history of the nation.

  A prolix and ill arranged but elaborate and sensible performance, founded throughout on original authorities, and, from the detailed and painstaking investigations it contains of many fundamental points, still forming perhaps the best introduction we possess to the study of the English constitution.

General

  Have you seen Lyttleton’s Monody on his wife’s death? There are parts of it too stiff and poetical; but others truly tender and elegiac, as one would wish.

  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.

  In the “Persian Letters,” as in all his other works, Lyttelton is but an imitator:—the idea, the name, and some of the details are borrowed from the “Lettres Persannes” of the President Montesquieu—then in high repute. Johnson, impressed perhaps with the idea that they were written by an Oxonian of eighteen, treats them slightingly as too “visibly the production of a very young man.” They would not, it is true, thirty years later, have added much to the fame which Lyttelton had, rather by his rank than his writings, attained; but they are, we think, no contemptible production even for the age of twenty-five; and they may still be read with amusement and some information as to the manners of the time. Their most serious faults to modern readers, says Mr. Phillimore, “are occasional indelicacies, both of thought and expression—which, as well as their extreme political opinions, was a subject of regret to Lyttelton in after-life.” The indelicacy, though probably now less visible than it was in the original edition, is still too obvious; but it was the style of that day, and hardly exceeds the freedoms of some papers in the “Spectator,” and falls infinitely short of the licence of his original—the great French magistrate and moralist, as he is called.

  His literary reputation in a great measure died with him; his poems are long since forgotten and his prose writings have little merit. The “Persian Letters,” the most amusing of them all, were written while he was very young, and are a tolerable imitation of Montesquieu. They contain passages indelicate and coarse, and could hardly be placed in the hands of the young and pure of our own day. They probably gave rise, however, to Goldsmith’s “Citizen of the World,” and by their popularity led that delightful writer to imitate and surpass them. But Goldsmith’s letters are the perfect and graceful productions of a man of genius, Lyttleton’s those of a coarse and inferior artist.

  Cruel sceptics, like Gibbon, have not failed to point out that his works are “not illuminated by a ray of genius.” But his heart has spoken once or twice, in the loosely-strung Pindaric Monody to his wife, and in the elegiac prologue to “Coriolanus,” Thomson’s posthumous tragedy.