A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England, Scotland, and Ireland/Volume 4/George Granville, Lord Lansdown
From a drawing.
Pub. Feb. 27, 1807, by J. Scott, 442 Strand.
GEORGE GRANVILLE,
LORD LANSDOWN,
Imitated Waller;[1] but as that poet has been much excelled since, a faint copy of a faint master must strike still less. It was fortunate for his lordship, that in an age when persecution raged so fiercely against lukewarm authors, he had an intimacy with the inquisitor-general: how else would such lines as these have escaped the Bathos?
“When thy gods
Enlighten thee to speak their dark decrees.”[2]
“A Letter from a Nobleman abroad to his Friend in England.” 1722.[3]
Lord Lansdown being confined in the Tower in the same room in which sir Robert Walpole had been prisoner, and had left his name on the window, wrote these lines under it:
“Good unexpected, evil unforeseen,
Appear by turns, as Fortune shifts the scene:
Some rais’d aloft, come tumbling down again,
And fall so hard, they bound and rise again.”
[Lord Lansdown, who descended from a family which traced its ancestry to the first duke of Normandy, was himself grandson of the famous sir Bevil Granville, who lost his life so heroically at the battle of Lansdown in 1643.[4] He received his first tincture of education in France under the tuition of sir William Ellis, a man of letters. In 1677, in the tenth year of his age, he was entered at Trinity-college, Cambridge;[5] and in 1679 recited a copy of his own verses to the princess Mary d'Este of Modena, then duchess of York, when she visited the university. In 1680 he was admitted to the degree of master of arts, and left college soon after. At the accession of James the second he addressed the new monarch in three short metrical panegyrics, which were commended by Waller, whose praise animated the young poet to breathe a rapture of acknowledgment,
"In numbers such as Waller's self might use."
He had early imbibed principles of loyalty, and was with difficulty prevented from taking up arms in defence of his sovereign, both at the time of Monmouth’s rebellion, and at the revolution. On the latter occasion he expressed his manly feelings in a letter to his father, which has been printed by Dr. Anderson.[7] Having no public employment, and possessing but a contracted fortune, he lived in retirement during the reign of king William, devoted to literary avocations, the fruits of which appeared in his plays and poems. By a laudable economy he preserved himself at the same time from those embarrassments which in more advanced life he is said to have incurred. Having received a considerable addition to his finances by the death of his father and uncle, he became a representative for Fowey, in Cornwall, in 1702, and continued to serve in parliament till 1710, when he was made secretary at war in the place of sir Robert Walpole. In 1711 he was created baron Lansdown, and afterwards appointed comptroller and treasurer of the household to queen Anne. On the accession of George the first he was removed from his offices, and his Tory connexions prevented his being employed in that or the succeeding reign. Having protested against the bill for attainting Ormond and Bolingbroke, he fell under the suspicion of plotting against the government, was seized and sent to the Tower in Sept. 1715, where he was confined seventeen months and then discharged, without being brought to trial. In 1719 he made an ardent speech against the practice of occasional conformity, part of which is given by Cibber. In 1722 he is thought to have been driven abroad by his profusion, though on a pretence of retrieving his health rather than his circumstances. During his absence from England he composed most of his prose pieces. In 1732 he published the handsome edition of his works mentioned by lord Orford. He now appeared at court, where he was well received by queen Caroline, to whom and to the princess Anne he presented his splendid volumes, with verses on the blank leaves, which concluded his poetical labours. He died in Hanover Square, Jan. 30, 1735, in the sixty-eighth year of his age.
The character of Granville, as Dr. Anderson observes, seems to have been amiable and respectable. His good nature and politeness have been celebrated by Pope[8] and others: and though the splendour of his rank procured him more admiration than the lustre of his genius, yet he was not destitute of that secondary brilliance which proceeds from being laboriously polished, rather than inherently luminous. The general characteristics of his poetry are studied elegance and quaint sprightliness; for he is seldom tender, and very rarely sublime. Of his lighter productions the chief source is gallantry, and the radical defect, as in Waller and Cowley, is a superabundance of mythological allusion or of affected passion. Dr. Johnson says, somewhat austerely, "they are trifles written by idleness, and published by vanity:” but the same stern critic admits that his lordship's
- "Prologues and Epilogues"
have a just claim to praise; that his
is not deficient in splendour and gaiety; that his
is neither inelegant nor injudicious; and that his
has many passages which are at least pretty, though they do not rise to any high degree of excellence.
His lordship's dramatic pieces were six in number; the titles of which and dates of publication may be seen in Biog. Dramatica, vol. i. p. 196. The following will serve to denote his poetic style:
"So calm and so serene but now;
What means this change on Myra's brow?
Her aguish love now glows and burns,
Then chills and shakes, and the cold fit returns.
Mock'd with deluding looks and smiles
When on her pity I depend;
My airy hope she soon beguiles,
And laughs to see my torments end.
So up the steepy hill with pain,
The weighty stone is roll'd in vain,
Which having touch'd the top recoils,
And leaves the labourer to renew his toils."
- "LOVE.
"To love, is to be doom'd on earth to feel
What after death the tortur'd meet in hell.
The vulture dipping in Prometheus' side
His bloody beak, with his torn liver dy'd,
Is love: the stone that labours up the hill
Mocking the labourer's toil, returning still,
Is love: those streams where Tantalus is curst
To sit, and never drink, with endless thirst;
Those loaden boughs that with their burden bend
To court his taste and yet escape his hand,
All this is love; that to dissembled joys
Invites vain men, with real grief destroys."
"As Britain in rich soil abounding wide,
Furnish'd for use, for luxury, and pride,
Yet spreads her wanton sails on every shore
For foreign wealth, insatiate still for more;
To her own wool the silks of Asia joins,
And to her plenteous harvests Indian mines:
So Dryden, not contented with the fame
Of his own works, though an immortal name!
To lands remote sends forth his learned muse
The noblest seeds of foreign wit to choose;
Feasting our sense so many various ways;
Say, is ’t thy bounty or thy thirst of praise,
That by comparing others, all might see
Who most excell’d are yet excell’d by thee?”]
- ↑ [And wished to be regarded as his poetical successor. Witness his lordship’s Preface: “As these poems seem to begin where Mr. Waller left off, though far unequal and short of so inimitable an original; they may, however, be permitted to remain to posterity as a faithful register of the reigning beauties in the succeeding age.”
- ↑ “Heroic Love,” scene i. [Yet Dryden thus complimented him on this his “excellent tragedy:”
“Auspicious poet, wert thou not my friend,
How could I envy what I must commend!
But since ’t is Nature’s law in love and wit,
That youth should reign, and withering age submit,
With less regret those laurels I resign,
Which dying on my brows, revive on thine.”] - ↑ Somers’s Tracts, fourth coll. vol. iv. p. 416.
- ↑ A volume of elegiac verses on the death of this loyalist was printed at Oxford, and reprinted at London, in 1684. It comprised the contributions of many minor poets of the time.
- ↑ This appears from a copy of Latin verses on the marriage of the prince of Orange and the princess Mary, in the Cambridge congratulations of that year. Anderson’s Brit. Poets, vol. vii. p. 689.
- ↑ The late Mr. Hurdis said, with truth and taste, in his Village Curate,
"Waller's Muse
In courteous Granville lives, and still we hear
Of Jove and Juno, Mercury and Mars,
And all the nauseous mythologic rout."Lord Lansdown's reputation was formerly too much cried up, it is now too much sunk.
- ↑ See also Gen. Dict. art. Granville, and Cibber’s and Johnson's Lives of the Poets.
- ↑ Pope inscribed his early poem of Windsor Forest to "Granville the Polite;" and flatteringly said:Young addressed an Epistle to him of high-flown praise."'Tis yours, my lord, to bless our soft retreats,
And call the Muses to their ancient seats;
To paint anew the flow'ry sylvan scenes,
To crown the forests with immortal greens,
Make Windsor-hills in lofty numbers rise,
And lift her turrets nearer to the skies;
To sing those honours you deserve to wear,
And add new lustre to her silver star." - ↑ Myra was Mrs. Frances Brudenell, daughter of lord B. first married to the earl of Newburgh, in Scotland; and secondly to lord Bellew, an Irish peer. Dr. King, of Oxford, who had some dispute with her concerning property in Ireland, wrote a severe poem entitled "The Toast," of which this lady is the heroine. See Malone's Dryden, vol. i. part ii. p. 114. Dr. Anderson thinks it probable that most of the verses addressed to Myra, however disguised by their application, were originally designed for Mary d'Esté of Modena, whose charms had fascinated him at college. In this case Myra will become a poetic anagram.