Whether West's constitution had, at any period of his short life, been strong enough to enable him to bear up against the fatigues and excitement of the military profession may reasonably be doubted. At all events, before eleven months had elapsed from the date of the foregoing appeal to Walpole, and before the desired opportunity of testing his physical powers in the army had presented itself, he was sinking into the grave. For some time past, indeed, though apparently cheered by occasional rays of hope, his health had been irremediably on the decline. "Your letter," writes Walpole to him only twenty-eight days before his death, "made me quite melancholy, till I came to the postscript of fine weather. Your so suddenly finding the benefit of it makes me trust you will entirely recover your health and spirits with the warm season. Nobody wishes it more than I: nobody has more reason, as few have known you so long." In the mean time, when Gray, in the month of September, 1741, had returned to London from his travels in France and Italy, he found his amiable friend not only prostrated by illness, but overwhelmed by family misfortunes. Since then, however, the spring, as we have seen by Walpole's letter, had faintly revived him, and accordingly, leaving Gray behind him in London, where they had lately been fellow-residents, he set out on a visit to Hertfordshire. Thither it was that 1 Walpole's 'Letters,' vol. i. pp. 160, 161. Gray at this time forwarded to him in MS. his beautiful ode on the Spring, but, before it reached Hertfordshire, the invalid was no more. His death took place at Pope's, in the parish of Hatfield,' on the 1st of June, 1742, at the age of twenty-six. West's remains rest in the chancel of Hatfield Church, beneath a stone which once bore the following inscription : "Here lieth the body of Richard West, Esq., only son of the Right Hon. Richard West, Esq., Lord Chancellor of Ireland, who died the 1st of June, 1742, in the twenty-sixth year of his age." The loss of West was deplored in verse both by Gray and Ashton; by the former in a well-known elegiac sonnet commencing "In vain to me the smiling mornings shine;" and by Ashton in the following stanzas, which have not the less merit that they are little known : "While surfeited with life, each hoary knave "Thy mind, not exercised so oft in vain, 1 'Gentleman's Magazine,' vol. lxxii. p. 493. 2 Unfortunately, at the recent restoration of Hatfield Church, no trace of this interesting memorial could be discovered; neither has it since been replaced by any more modern tribute to the poet's genius. "A friendly aspect, not suborned by art, An eye, which looked the meaning of thy heart; "Thy pen disdained to seek the servile ways "No lurking venom from thy pencil fell; Thine was the kindest satire, living well: The vain, the loose, the base, might blush to see In what thou wert, what they themselves should be. "Let me not charge on Providence a crime, That snatched thee, blooming, to a better clime, Virtues! which only could have starved thee here." GEORGE MONTAGU, EARL OF HALIFAX, K.G. GEORGE MONTAGU, Viscount Sunbury-for such was the title borne by the third Earl of Halifax during his nonage was born on the 5th of October, 1716. Amiable, popular, strikingly elegant in his figure and manners, and endowed with abilities much beyond the common average, there was probably, of the young men who about the same time as himself quitted Eton for the University, not one who carried away with him a happier combination of mental and personal accomplishments than the heir of the Halifax branch of the house of Montagu. In the words of Richard Cumberland, the dramatic writer, who afterwards served under him as his private secretary" There was something extremely brilliant and more than commonly engaging in the person, manners, and address of the Earl of Halifax. had been educated at Eton, and came with the reputation of a good scholar to Trinity College [Cambridge], where he established himself in the good opinion of the whole society; not only by his He regular and orderly conduct, but in a very distinguished manner by the attention which he paid to his studies and the proofs he gave in his public exercises of his classical acquirements. He was certainly, when compared with men of his condition, to be distinguished as a scholar much above the common mark. He quoted well and copiously from the best authors, chiefly Horace. He was very fond of English poetry, and recited it very emphatically, after the manner of Quin, who had been his master in that art."" 2 Lord Sunbury at an early age found himself occupied with the duties and cares of a landed proprietor and married man. In 1739, for example, the death of his father put him in possession of the family earldom and estates, and, on the 9th of May, in that year, at the age of twenty-two, he married a "virtuous and exemplary lady," Annie, daughter of William Richards, Esq., on whose succession to the estates of Sir Thomas Dunk, of Tonge, in Kent, the young Earl assumed the surname of Dunk. It was to the credit of Lord Halifax's heart, that, on the death of his father, and his own marriage with the heiress of Tonge, he availed himself of the opportunities which those events afforded him of making provision for his sisters, who had apparently been left with but indifferent maintenances. His married 1 Cumberland's 'Memoirs,' by Himself, vol. i. pp. 130, 131. 2 Ibid., vol. i. p. 131. 3 Mrs. Delany's Autobiography and Correspondence,' vol. iii. p. 285 |