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arrival. The earl of Pembroke, who succeeded the prince in his office, again appointed Sir John admiral of the home, or channel fleet, for the ensuing year; and, on the 24th of May, he was created, by letters patent, rear-admiral of Great Britain.

When the preliminaries of peace were signed in the year 1712, Sir John was sent with General Hill, in the month of July, to take possession of Dunkirk, according to the treaty; and having, on his return from thence, struck his flag, he never again accepted of any naval command.

Owing to some court cabal, and the personal dislike to Sir John, entertained by some individuals who possessed irresistible influence in the councils of King George I., the admiral, although it was impossible for the most inveterate malice to affix the slightest stigma or slur on his character, was most unjustly and scandalously dismissed, not only from the admiralty board, but from every appointment he held. Retiring to a country villa, erected by himself near Greenwich, he continued ever afterwards to live a private life. He died on the 21st of August, 1720.

James Craggs.

DIED A. D. 1720.

THE patronage of the dutchess of Marlborough elevated this individual from an exceedingly obscure situation to the office of joint postmaster-general. He was the son of a barber, and received his early education at Chelsea. He was attached to various embassies, and was sent with the intelligence of Queen Anne's death to the British resident at Hanover. Lord Sunderland set him up as a rival to Walpole; and, it is probable, that, had he lived long enough, if he did not coalesce with, he would have been exceedingly troublesome to that celebrated minister. He succeeded Addison as secretary of state; and, on several occasions, acted as a lord-justice during the king's visits to Hanover. He became deeply involved in the South sea bubble, having, with his father, according to the report of the committee of secrecy, held fictitious stock to the amount of £36,000. Pending the parliamentary inquiry on the subject that ensued, he fell sick of the small-pox, and died, at an early age, in 1720.

Craggs appears to have been a man of pleasure, talent, and great suavity of manners. He patronised Pope, who wrote an epitaph to his memory; and Gay, to whom he made a present of South sea stock, also Addison, Warburton, and Kneller. He frequently deplored the meanness of his birth, of which he was sometimes reminded by his noble contemporaries. On one occasion, he remarked to the duke of Buckingham, who had spoken with great severity against ministers,— "Let what will be said, your grace knows that business must be carried on; and the old proverb is true, that the pot must boil." "Ay," replied the duke, " and there is, as you know, Mr Secretary, as old, and as true a proverb, that, when the pot boils, the scum floats upper. most.'"

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Sheffield, Duke of Normanby and Buckinghamshire.

BORN A. D. 1649.-DIED A. D. 1721.

If the principal charm of biography consisted in recounting swelling titles, aristocratic pride, and high official situation, few could desire a more interesting life to narrate than that on which we are entering. But the mists of the valley gradually gather around all accidental distinctions, and the eye of the student who scans history that he may learn what to admire and imitate, reverts to him only whose inborn virtue has raised him to an eminence above the smoke and stir of ordinary life.

John Sheffield was the only son of Edmund, earl of Mulgrave, and was born in the year 1649. He was early left an orphan by the death of his father in 1658. The state of the country at that time possessed little attraction for a young scion of aristocracy, and his tutor deemed it expedient to carry him abroad, in order that his studies might be more successfully prosecuted. The young earl is said, when no more than twelve years of age, to have summarily dismissed his tutor, for a ludicrous inconsistency which he discovered between his precepts and practice. Great praise is bestowed upon him by his biographers, for a resolution which he is said to have made when his tutor was dismissed, of supplying the deficiencies of his education by his own industry; and unquestionably to pursue a course of study was highly commendable in a mere boy, who had so many allurements to idleness. When we learn that his studies were undertaken chiefly for the sake of rivalling the gallants of the day in knowledge, and that they never detained him more than "several hours in the day' from his pleasures, we are compelled to qualify our praise. Along with his appetite for knowledge, he imbibed a thirst for military glory. In 1666 he went to sea as a volunteer in the first Dutch war. In the following year he obtained the command of one of the troops of horse, raised to defend the country in case of an invasion. On the meeting of the parliament in October, 1667, he was summoned, in spite of his extreme youth, to fill his place as a peer, but the summons being strenuously opposed by the earl of Rochester, was afterwards cancelled. He would have been a prodigy had he escaped uncontaminated from the flood of licentiousness which at this period was sweeping down all the old barriers of morality. As might be expected, he sailed with the tide, or rather he outstripped it in his headlong career of debauchery. He had early in life entered himself amongst the worshippers of the muses; and his poetical powers, such as they were, he employed to heighten the relish of his amours. Th merits that is to say, debauchery, and the power of writing

'The story is, that while in France he was earnestly advised by his tutor not to kneel as the mass was carried through the street, since such an act was nothing better than idolatry. Resolved to follow this pious counsel, he was in such a hurry, when next he met the procession of priests bearing the mass, to get out of the road, that he stumbled over his governor whom he found already on his knees close behind him. This story is not a very likely one, but it has been preserved. What is not interesting that relates to duke?

smutty rhymes-raised him to some notice at court, and enabled him to do Dryden material service in gaining the situation of poet-laureate. In 1672 he went out again as a volunteer against the Dutch. He distinguished himself by his bravery, and, on his return to London, was promoted to the command of the Royal Catherine, at that time the best among the second-rate ships in the navy. With this honour he was especially delighted: it gave him, he says, more pleasure than any favour he afterwards received from the court. So true it is, that the first distinction we attain is the sweetest. There has been more than one instance of men, whose lives have been, as it were, crowded with honours, looking back to some early and comparatively unimportanţ triumph, a college honour or a maiden speech, with a keener delight than the most brilliant of their subsequent successes could awaken. Is the following year we find him colonel of a regiment of his own raising, to which was added, shortly afterwards, the command of the old Holland regiment. On May 29th, 1674, he was installed into the order of the garter, and made a gentleman of the bed-chamber. These civil honours, glittering enough, but otherwise of no interest, did not content him, for in the following year he made a campaign in the French service under Turenne. A long story is told by some of his biographers-himself among the number of intrigues which were carried on at this period about the office of colonel to the first regiment of foot-guards; but it would be tedious to narrate, and sufficient is known when we say that he failed in his effort to obtain the command, but had subtlety enough to prevent the success of the person who opposed him. In 1679, on the disgrace of the duke of Monmouth, he was made lordlieutenant of the county of York and governor of Hull; and in the same year he wrote an essay, entitled, The Character of a Tory,' which was designed as an answer to the marquess of Halifax's Character of a Trimmer;' but which cannot, for a moment, be compared with that able pamphlet, either as a piece of argument or of elegant writing. Though he does not proceed to the ultima Thule of tory principlesthe doctrine of passive obedience—he borders on it as closely as possible. Indeed we cannot see, for our own parts, why, when he admits the king's dispensing power, he should not take one step farther and make his system harmonious by denying the right of the subject to resist. The concluding passage is so characteristic of the writer, that we must be permitted to quote it:-"Whereas, our poor trimmer blames people for so monopolizing the prince's favour, that the poor trimmer can get none of it, I confess 'tis true, but methinks not very strange. I allow his simile to hold good, that not only these gentlemen, (the ministry,) but any other men in the world, even trimmers themselves, would engross the sunshine with the hazard of being burnt, in case there were not enough of it for every body. And for my part, though it is a great fault in mankind, I cannot but charitably forgive it, because I am one of that race myself; and bad is the best of us, whig, tory, and trimmer." It is this hard unblushing selfishness which makes the writings of the pseudo-wits of Charles the Second's reign so peculiarly disgusting. It may be true that Sheffield has rightly stated the general feelings of statesmen; but surely this distinct avowal and semicommendation of them is an efficacious method of extinguishing all generous emotion or lofty principle in nobler spirits.

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In 1680 Tangier was besieged by the Moors, and the earl, having volunteered his services, was sent to its relief. It is said that the ship, appointed by the king to convey him, was in such a leaky condition as to give rise to a suspicion that his life had been aimed at, and that on discovering this, he would not allow the king's health to be drunk on board the vessel till they were safely landed. His expedition was immediately successful, for the Moors retired without striking a blow, and on his return his anger against the king was speedily dissipated by returning kindness. Mulgrave had always lived on terms of great intimacy and friendship with the duke of York, and when the duke ascended the throne he was immediately sworn of the privy council, and, in a little time afterwards, appointed lord-chamberlain of the household. In the measures of this disgraceful reign he bore a considerable part. He was one of the members of the ecclesiastical commission. After the Revolution he was, on this account, brought into some trouble, from which the assistance of Tillotson rescued him. In a letter to Tillotson he attempts to defend, or rather palliate his conduct by asserting his ignorance of the office being unconstitutional. This is an expedient to which a man of much talent would never have resorted; for such gross ignorance as his excuse implied was to the last degree disgraceful. He complied so far with the wishes of his sovereign, as to attend and kneel at mass; but when urged by the popish priests to throw off the garb of protestantism, which, indeed, had always hung very loosely about him, he replied, as we are informed by Burnet, that he was willing to receive instruction, and that he had taken much pains to believe in God, who made the world and all men in it; but that he should not easily be persuaded that man was quits, and made God again.2

Though the earl took no part in bringing about the Revolution, keeping himself at a most sedulous distance from the bold, and of some we may say, honest men who effected that great change, he lent himself willingly to the establishment of a new government. He did not, however, desert his old master with the heartless treachery which characterized Halifax and others. When a letter was brought from the king to the council, stating that he was in the hands of the rabble at Feversham, and praying for protection, Mulgrave was the only man who had courage to bring the letter forward openly; and though much displeasure was expressed by some members of the council, and means were tried to thwart his endeavours to obtain relief for the ill-fated prince, he manfully persisted, and at length compelled them, for very shame, to send a body of troops to the king's release. In the same way, when the house of the Spanish ambassador was pulled down by the mob, he took upon himself, though no longer in office, to order apartments for the ambassador at Whitehall. For some time after the Revolution he remained out of office. It is said that he was personally applied to by William to join the government, but refused for a long time, and the story gains some credit from the circumstance of his being created marquess of Normanby in 1694. His scruples must have

After relating this story, Dr Johnson remarks, "A pointed sentence is bestowed by successive transmission on the last it will fit: this sentence of transubstantiation, whatever be its value, was uttered long ago by Anne Askew, one of the first sufferers for the protestant religion, who, in the time of Henry VIII. was tortured in the Tower."-Lives of the Poets.

been ultimately overcome, for before the end of William's reign he entered the cabinet council, and received a pension of £3000 a-year. Tradition states, that in his younger days he had been a suitor, and not quite an unfavoured one, to the Princess Anne. If this be true, it accounts for his rapid advancement on Anne's ascent to the throne. In 1702, just before her coronation, he was made lord-privy-seal, and shortly afterwards lord-lieutenant and custos-rotulorum of the northriding of Yorkshire. In the ensuing October he was chosen one of the commissioners to treat of the union between England and Scotland; and, in March 1703, he was first made duke of Normanby, and a fortnight subsequently, duke of Buckinghamshire. These honours, instead of binding him to the queen's service, served only to inflame, to a higher pitch, his natural arrogance. Becoming jealous of the duke of Marlborough, he resigned his offices,-refused to accept the chancellorship offered to him by the queen, who was anxious to appease him,—and so far lost command of his temper as to break out into satire even against her majesty. While thus unembarrassed by the cares of office, he employed himself in building the magnificent house in James's park, which has since become one of the royal palaces. After dinner he was accustomed to spend a good part of the evening in gambling, and scandal adds that he did not gain the reputation of a fair gamester. On the change of ministry in 1710, he once more accepted office, and we are, therefore, to regard him as concurring in the general policy of Harley's weak and wicked ministry,-a ministry which was built on the tongue of a shrew, and the intrigue of a waiting woman, and overthrown by internal dissension. When Harley, in his turn, fell through the machinations of a still bolder intriguer, Buckingham clung to him, and became a steady opponent of the measures of the succeeding administration. His idle hours were spent in writing indifferent tragedies and bad poetry. He expired on the 24th of February, 1721. His corpse lay in almost regal state for some days at Buckingham-house, after which it was conveyed, with a magnificence which scarcely became a subject, to Westminster-abbey, and there interred. A splendid monument was erected to his memory in Henry the Seventh's chapel; and the following inscription, which he had himself written, was inscribed upon it along with his name and titles :—

Dubius sed non improbus vixi,
Incertus morior et inturbatus.
Humanum est nescire et errare.
Christum adveneror, Deo confido
Omnipotenti, Benevolentissimo,

Ens entium miserere mihi.3

He was thrice married, and each time to a widow. By his first and second wife he had no children; but by his third-who was a Lady Katharine Darnley, a natural daughter of James the Second, and who had been married to the earl of Anglesea, from whom she was parted at her own suit-he had several. One only of these survived their father, Edmund, a youth of high promise, who was unfortunately cut

We have given the inscription as it was written by Buckingham himself. The whole of it was not inserted, as Atterbury thought the words Christum adveneror too tame for the walls of the abbey. This passage was accordingly struck out.

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