The comedies, which he has not printed in his own edition of his works, I never saw; Once a Lover and always a Lover, is said to be, in a great degree, indecent and gross. Granville could not admire without bigotry; he copied the wrong, as well as the right, from his masters, and may be supposed to have learned obscenity from Wycherley, as he learned mythology from Waller.
In his Jew of Venice, as Rowe remarks, the character of Shylock is made comick, and we are prompted to laughter, instead of detestation.
It is evident that Heroick Love was written, and presented on the stage, before the death of Dryden. It is a mythological tragedy, upon the love of Agamemnon and Chryseis, and, therefore, easily sunk into neglect, though praised in verse by Dryden, and in prose by Pope.
It is concluded by the wise Ulysses with this speech:
Fate holds the strings, and men like children move
But as they’re led; success is from above.
At the accession of queen Anne, having his fortune improved by bequests from his father, and his uncle the earl of Bath, he was chosen into parliament for Fowey. He soon after engaged in a joint translation of the Invectives against Philip, with a design, surely weak and puerile, of turning the thunder of Demosthenes upon the head of Lewis.
He afterwards, in 1706, had his estate again augmented by an inheritance from his elder brother, sir Bevil Granville, who, as he returned from the government of Barbadoes, died at sea. He continued to serve in parliament; and, in the ninth year of queen Anne, was chosen knight of the shire for Cornwall.
At the memorable change of the ministry, 1710, he was made secretary at war, in the place of Mr. Robert Walpole.
Next year, when the violence of party made twelve peers in a day, Mr. Granville became lord Lansdowne baron Bideford, by a promotion justly remarked to be not invidious, because he was the heir of a family in which two peerages, that of the earl of Bath, and lord Granville of Potheridge, had lately become extinct. Being now high in the queen’s favour, he, 1712, was appointed comptroller of the household, and a privy counsellor; and to his other honours was added the dedication of Pope’s Windsor Forest. He was advanced, next year, to be treasurer of the household.
Of these favours he soon lost all but his title; for, at the accession of king George, his place was given to the earl Cholmondeley, and he was persecuted with the rest of his party. Having protested against the bill for attainting Ormond and Bolingbroke, he was, after the insurrection in Scotland, seized, Sept. 26, 1715, as a suspected man, and confined in the Tower, till Feb. 8, 1717, when he was at last released, and restored to his seat in parliament; where, 1719, he made a very ardent and animated speech against the repeal of the bill to prevent occasional conformity, which, however, though it was then printed, he has not inserted into his works.