Dialogues of the Dead

Dialogues of the Dead

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Dialogues of the Dead, by Lord
Lyttelton, Edited by Henry Morley
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Title: Dialogues of the Dead
Author: Lord Lyttelton
Editor: Henry Morley
Release Date: February 3, 2006 [eBook #17667]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK
DIALOGUES OF THE DEAD***

Transcribed from the 1889 Cassell & Company edition by David Price,
email [email protected]

DIALOGUES OF THE DEAD.
BY LORD LYTTELTON.
CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED: LONDON, PARIS, NEW YORK
& MELBOURNE. 1889.

INTRODUCTION.
George, Lord Lyttelton, was born in 1709, at Hagley, in Worcestershire.
He was educated at Eton and at Christchurch, Oxford, entered
Parliament, became a Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the
Exchequer. In 1757 he withdrew from politics, was raised to the
peerage, and spent the last eighteen years of his life in lettered ease. In
1760 Lord Lyttelton first published these "Dialogues of the Dead,"
which were revised for a fourth edition in 1765, and in 1767 he
published in four volumes a "History of the Life of King Henry the
Second and of the Age in which he Lived," a work upon which he had
been busy for thirty years. He began it not long after he had published,
at the age of twenty-six, his "Letters from a Persian in England to his
Friend at Ispahan." If we go farther back we find George Lyttelton,
aged twenty-three, beginning his life in literature as a poet, with four
eclogues on "The Progress of Love."
To the last Lord Lyttelton was poet enough to feel true fellowship with
poets of his day. He loved good literature, and his own works show that
he knew it. He counted Henry Fielding among his friends; he was a
friend and helper to James Thomson, the author of "The Seasons;" and
when acting as secretary to the king's son, Frederick, Prince of Wales
(who held a little court of his own, in which there was much said about
liberty), his friendship brought Thomson and Mallet together in work
on a masque for the Prince and Princess, which included the song of
"Rule Britannia."
Before Lord Lyttelton followed their example, "Dialogues of the Dead"
had been written by Lucian, and by Fenelon, and by Fontenelle; and in

our time they have been written by Walter Savage Landor. This
half-dramatic plan of presenting a man's own thoughts upon the life of
man and characters of men, and on the issues of men's characters in
shaping life, is a way of essay writing pleasant alike to the writer and
the reader. Lord Lyttelton was at his best in it. The form of writing
obliged him to work with a lighter touch than he used when he sought
to maintain the dignity of history by the style of his "History of Henry
II." His calm liberality of mind enters into the discussion of many
topics. His truths are old, but there are no real truths of human life and
conduct, worth anything at all, that are of yesterday. Human love itself
is called "the old, old story;" but do we therefore cease from loving, or
from finding such ways as we can of saying that we love. Dr. Johnson
was not at his wisest when he found fault with Lord Lyttelton because,
in his "Dialogues of the Dead," "that man sat down to write a book, to
tell the world what the world had all his life been telling him." This was
exactly what he wished to do. In the Preface to his revised edition Lord
Lyttelton said, "Sometimes a new dress may render an old truth more
pleasing to those whom the mere love of novelty betrays into error, as it
frequently does not only the wits, but the sages of these days. Indeed,
one of the best services that could now be done to mankind by any
good writer would be the bringing them back to common sense, from
which the desire of shining by extraordinary notions has seduced great
numbers, to the no small detriment of morality and of all real
knowledge."
At any rate, we now find it worth while to know what the world had
been telling all his life to an enlightened, highly-educated man, who
was an active politician in the days of Walpole and of the elder Pitt,
who was a friend of Pope's and of the best writers of the day, and who
in his occasional verse added at least one line to the household words
of