But his Lucy Fortescue deserves more than a mere allusion, en passant. That Lord Lyttelton is still remembered and read as a poet, is solely for her sake: it is she who has made the shades of Hagley classic ground, and hallowed its precincts by the remembrance of the fair and gentle being, the tender woman, wife, and mother, who in the prime of youth and loveliness, melted like a creature of air and light from her husband's arms,
"And left him on this earth disconsolate!"
That the verses she inspired are still popular, is owing to the power of truth, which has here given lasting interest to what were otherwise mediocre. Lord Lyttelton was not much of a poet; but his love was real; its object was real, beautiful, and good: thus buoyed up, in spite of his own faults and the change of taste, he has survived the rest of the rhyming gentry of his time, who wrote epigrams on fans and shoe-buckles,—songs to the Duchess of this and the Countess of that—and elegies to Miras, Delias, and Chloes.
Lucy Fortescue, daughter of Hugh Fortescue, Esq. of Devonshire, and grand-daughter of Lord Aylmer, was born in 1718. She was about two-and-twenty when Lord Lyttelton first became attached to her, and he was in his thirty-first year: in person and character she realized all he had imagined in his "Advice to Belinda."[64]
Without, all beauty—and all peace within.
....*....*....*....*
Blest is the maid, and worthy to be blest,
Whose soul, entire by him she loves possest,
Feels every vanity in fondness lost,
And asks no power, but that of pleasing most:
Her's is the bliss, in just return to prove
The honest warmth of undissembled love;
For her, inconstant man might cease to range,
And gratitude forbid desire to change.
To the more peculiar attributes of her sex—beauty and tenderness,—she united all the advantages of manner,—
Polite as she in courts had ever been;