the estate which he had lost. Yet this step does not appear to have lost him the royal favour: for after the restoration, he was made one of the lords of the bedchamber, called to the privy council, appointed lord lieutenant of York, and master of the horse. All these high offices, however, he lost again in 1666: for having been refused the post of president of the north, he became disaffected to the king; endeavoured to raise mutinies among the forces, and to stir up sedition among the people. The detection of this affair so exasperated the king, that he ordered Buckingham to be seized but the duke found means to escape, notwithstanding a proclamation was issued, requiring his surrender; and the king being soon after appeased by a show of humble submission, the duke was taken again into favour. In 1670 he was supposed to be concerned in an attempt on the duke of Ormond's life: but it does not seem that this transaction weakened his interest at college or at court; for in 1671 he was installed chancellor of the university of Cambridge, and was sent embassador to France, and the next year was employed in a second embassy at Utrecht. In 1674 he resigned the chancellorship of Cambridge, and about the same time became a parti san and favourer of the Non-conformists. In February 1676 he was committed to the Tower by order of the house of lords, for refusing to retract the purport of a speech concerning a dissolution of parliament;

• His letter written during this confinement to Charles the second, is given by Collins.

but upon a petition to the king, was discharged the May following. In 1680 he joined the earl of Shaftes bury in all the violences of opposition; and falling into a bad state of health, about the time of king Charles's death, he went into the country, where he continued till his decease on April 16, 1688, an event which happened at a tenant's house at Kirkby Moorside, after three days illness, arising from a cold which he caught by sitting on the ground after fox-hunting. He was buried in Westminster abbey 9.

"Of his personal character," adds Mr. Reed, "it is impossible to say any thing in vindication; for though his severest enemies acknowledge him to have possessed great vivacity and a quickness of parts peculiarly adapted to the purposes of ridicule, yet his warmest advocates have never attributed to him a single virtue. His generosity was profuseness; his wit malevolence; and the gratification of his passions his sole aim through life. As he had lived a profligate, he died a beggar, and as he had raised no friend in his life, he found none to lament him at his death. As a writer, however, he stands in a quite different point of view. There we see the wit and forget the libertine. His poems, which indeed are not very numerous, are capital in their kind3." This praise appears excessive,

• Biog. Dram. ut sup. and Biog. Dict. vol. xv. p. 102. • It deserves, however, to be remarked, that the memoir prefixed to his works informs us he bestowed a handsome annuity upon Cowley during life, and a noble monument in Westminster abbey after his death.

3 Biog. Dram. ut sup.

for he had so vitiated a taste, and so vulgar a style, that, except his Pindaric on Lord Fairfax, the follow! ing is perhaps the only effort of his muse which can be selected without conferring blame on the selector.

"TO HIS MISTRESS.

"What a dull fool was I
To think so gross a lie,

As that I ever was in love before?

I have, perhaps, known one or two
With whom I was content to be,

At that which they call keeping company;
But after all that they could do,

I still could be with more :

Their absence never made me shed a tear ;

And I can truly swear,

That till my eyes first gaz'd on you,

I ne'er beheld that thing I could adore.

"A world of things must curiously be sought,
A world of things must be together brought
To make up charms, which have the power to move
Through a discerning eye, true love;

That is a master-piece above

What only looks and shape can do,

There must be wit and judgment too;

Greatness of thought and worth, which draw
From the whole world, respect and awe.

"She that would raise a noble love, must find
Ways to beget a passion for her mind;
She must be that which she to be would seem;
For all true love is grounded on esteem:

Plainness and truth gain more a generous heart Than all the crooked subtleties of art.

She must be-what said I?-she must be you,
None but yourself that miracle can do.

At least, I'm sure, thus much I plainly see,
None but yourself e'er did it upon me:
'Tis you alone that can my heart subdue;
To you alone it always shall be true."]

HENEAGE FINCH,

SECOND EARL OF WINCHELSEA,

FIRST Cousin of the chancellor Nottingham, made a figure at the same period. He was intimate with Monke, and concerned in the Restoration; soon after which he was sent embassador to Mahomet the fourth. Monke had given the earl the government of Dover castle, which was continued to him; and when king James was stopped at Feversham, he sent for the earl of Winchelsea, who prevailed on the king to return to London. The earl voted for giving the crown to king William, by whom he was continued lord lieutenant of Kent. He died soon after, in 1689. On his return from Constantinople, visiting Sicily, he was witness to a terrible convulsion of Mount Etna, an account of which he sent to the king, and which was soon after published by authority, in a very thin quarto, with this title,

"A true and exact Relation of the late prodigious Earthquake, and Eruption of Mount Ætna, or Monte-Gibello; as it came in a Letter written to his Majesty from Naples. By the Right Honourable the Earle of Winchilsea,