The sister who loved and admired him so ardently felt doubtless that eulogium would be misplaced, and that all who read the name would recall the virtues, talents, and patriotism of her noble-hearted brother. Lord John Russell does him ample justice when he says, ‘Som̅ers is a bright example of a statesman who could live in times of revolution without rancour, who could hold the highest posts in a Court without meanness, who could unite mildness and charity to his opponents with the firmest attachment to the great principles of liberty, civil and religious, which he had early espoused, long promoted, and never abandoned;’ while Mackintosh says, ‘Som̅ers seems to have nearly realised the perfect model of a wise statesman in a free community.’ Notwithstanding the accumulation of professional and public business which fell to his share, from the day he arrived in London, he not only found time (as we have observed before) for literary studies and compositions, but for indulging in the society and correspondence of distinguished men of letters—foreigners as well as English. He held the poet Vincenzo Filicaja in high estimation, which was indeed reciprocal, as a Latin ode written in honour of ‘My Lord Giovanni Som̅ers, Cancelliere di Gran Brettagna,’ testifies.
Steele, Prior, and Congreve were among his associates. Newton, Locke, Addison, and Swift were marked out by him for preferment. He was a noble patron, and rewarded merit wherever he found it, and had it in his power. Lord Som̅ers was an exemplary son, and his mother (who survived her husband many years) had the satisfaction of seeing ‘little Johnnie’ rise to the highest honours of the State. Addison vouches for the religious faith of his benefactor, and tells us how unremitting he was in the performance of his devotional services, both in public and in his own family. Som̅ers never married, although in early life he wooed and won the affections of one Mistress Rawdon, the daughter of a rich Alderman, who broke off the match on the plea of the insufficiency of marriage settlements. We feel an inward conviction that in later days Sir John Rawdon must have repented his arbitrary decision. The title became extinct at Lord Som̅ers’s death, his property being shared by his two sisters, of whom the elder married Charles Cocks, Esquire of Castleditch, and the younger Sir John Jekyll, Master of the Rolls, an early friend and fellow-lawyer of her brother. From Mrs. Cocks descended the late Earl Som̅ers, to whom the present imperfect sketch of his ancestor was submitted in manuscript, but who has not, alas! lived to read it in the completed form.
He was indeed a worthy descendant of a great man, and by his death society at large, and a band of admiring and loving friends, have sustained an irreparable loss; while on the domestic hearth that light has been quenched which shed so radiant a glow on all those who clustered fondly round it. A scholar, an artist, a traveller, a linguist, the versatility of his information could only be equalled by the graceful refinement of his wit and the tenderness of his sympathy. He was one of those rarely gifted men, on whom the mantle of moral and intellectual qualities sit so easily, that in his genial company no feeling of inferiority was imposed on others. On the contrary—as the writer of these lines can testify, from grateful experience,—those who had the privilege of conversing with him partook for the moment, in some slight degree, of the brightness and intelligence of his rich nature.
No. 6.
FIELD-MARSHAL HENRY DE NASSAU, LORD OF AUVERQUERQUE.
In armour, holding a truncheon. Wig. Table in the background.
DIED OF HIS WOUNDS 1708.
By Sir Godfrey Kneller.
