Duke of Buckingham.
George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, the dissolute favourite of Charles II. is thus described by Dryden in his poem of Absalom and Achitophel.
“A man so various, that he seem’d to be,
Not one, but all mankind’s epitome:
Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong,
His every thing by starts, and nothing long:
But in the course of one revolving moon,
Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon.
In squandering wealth was his peculiar art,
Nothing went unrewarded, but desert:
Beggar’d by fools, when still he found too late,
He had his jest, and they—had his estate.”
At the time of King Charles’s death, he went into the country, and on the 16th of April, 1688, he died at a servant’s house at Rickby Meerside, from a cold caught by sitting on the ground after fox-hunting.
Pope in his Epistle to Lord Bathurst, thus alludes to his death.
“In the worst inn’s worst room, with mat half hung,
The floors of plaister, and the walls of dung;
On once a flock bed, but repaired with straw,
With tape tied curtains, never meant to draw;
The George and Garter dangling from that bed,
Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red,
Great Villiers lies. Alas! how chang’d from him,
That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim.”