THE EARL OF DORSET.
This noble earl was rather a patron of poets than a poet, and possessed more wit than genius. Charles Sackville was born on the 24th January 1637. He was descended directly from the famous Thomas, Lord Buckhurst. He was educated under a private tutor, travelled in Italy, and returned in time to witness the Restoration. In the first parliament thereafter, he sat for East Grinstead, in Surrey, and might have distinguished himself, had he not determined, in common with almost all the wits of the time, to run a preliminary career of dissipation. What a proof of the licentiousness of these times is to be found in the fact, that young Lord Buckhurst, Sir Charles Sedley, and Sir Thomas Ogle were fined for exposing themselves, drunk and naked, in indecent postures on the public street! In 1665, the erratic energies of Buckhurst found a more legitimate vent in the Dutch war. He attended the Duke of York in the great sea-fight of the 3d June, in which Opdam, the Dutch admiral, was, with all his crew, blown up. He is said to have composed the song, quoted afterwards, 'To all you ladies now at land,' on the evening before the battle, although Dr Johnson (who observes that seldom any splendid story is wholly true) maintains that its composition cost him a whole week, and that he only retouched it on that remarkable evening. Buckhurst was soon after made a gentleman of the bed-chamber, and despatched on short embassies to France. In 1674, his uncle, James Cranfield, the Earl of Middlesex, died, and left him his estate, and the next year the title, too, was conferred on him. In 1677, he became, by the death of his father, Earl of Dorset, and inherited the family estate. In 1684, his wife, whose name was Bagot, and by whom he had no children, died, and he soon after married a daughter of the Earl of Northampton, who is said to have been celebrated both for understanding and beauty. Dorset was courted by James, but found it impossible to coincide with his violent measures, and when the bishops were tried at Westminster Hall, he, along with some other lords, appeared to countenance them. He concurred with the Revolution settlement, and, after William's accession, was created lord chamberlain of the household, and received the Order of the Garter. His attendance on the king, however, eventually cost him his life, for having been tossed with him in an open boat on the coast of Holland for sixteen hours, in very rough weather, he caught an illness from which he never recovered. On 19th January 1705-6, he died at Bath.
During his life, Dorset was munificent in his kindness to such men of genius as Prior and Dryden, who repaid him in the current coin of the poor Parnassus of their day—gross adulation. He is now remembered mainly for his spirited war-song, and for such pointed lines in his satire on Edward Howard, the notorious author of 'British Princes,' as the following:—
'They lie, dear Ned, who say thy brain is barren,
When deep conceits, like maggots, breed in carrion;
Thy stumbling, foundered jade can trot as high
As any other Pegasus can fly.
So the dull eel moves nimbler in the mud
Than all the swift-finned racers of the flood.
As skilful divers to the bottom fall
Sooner than those who cannot swim at all,
So in this way of writing without thinking,
Thou hast a strange alacrity in sinking.'
This last line has not only become proverbial, but forms the distinct germ of 'The Dunciad.'