PHILIP,

DUKE OF WHARTON,

LIKE Buckingham and Rochester, comforted all the grave and dull, by throwing away the brightest profusion of parts on witty fooleries, debaucheries, and scrapes, which may mix graces with a great character, but never can compose one. If Julius Cæsar had only rioted with Catiline, he had never been emperor of the world. Indeed the duke of Wharton was not made for conquest; he was not equally formed for a round-house and Pharsalia. In one of his ballads he has bantered his own want of heroism; it was in a song he made on being seized by the guard in St. James's Park, for singing the Jacobite air, The King shall have his own again :

"The duke he drew out half his sword,

-the guard drew out the rest."

His levities, wit, and want of principles; his eloquence and adventures, are too well known to be recapitulated. With attachment to no

[Mr. Seward remarks, that the character of Lovelace in Clarissa has been supposed to be that of this nobleman; and

party, though with talents to govern any party, this lively man changed the free air of Westminster for the gloom of the Escurial; the prospect of king George's garter for the Pretender's3; and with indifference to all religion, the frolic lord who had writ the ballad on the archbishop of Canterbury, died in the habit of a capuchin 1.

It is difficult to give an account of the works of so mercurial a man, whose library was a tavern, and women of pleasure his muses. thousand sallies of his imagination may have

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what makes the supposition more likely is, that "The True Briton," a political paper in which the duke used to write, was printed by Mr. Richardson. Anecd. vol. ii. P. 333.]

* [When at Lyons he presented a fine horse to the chevalier de St. George, who invited him to Avignon, and flattered him with the visionary title of duke of Northumberland. Continuing there but one day, he made a visit at St. Germains to the dowager of James the second. A friend expostulating with him on this conduct, he answered, "That he had pawned his principles to Gordon, the Pretender's banker, for a considerable sum; and till he could repay him, he must be a Ja cobite; but when that was done, he would again return to the Whigs." Nichols's Misc. Poems, vol. v. p. 25.]

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[He was utterly destitute of all the necessaries of life, till some charitable fathers of a Bernardine convent offered him what assistance their house afforded. The duke accepted their kind proposal, and they administered all the relief in their power: but after languishing there for a week, he died at the age of thirty-two. Ibid.]