'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…