unhappy, and have
ever been more subject to pity than envy. A violent love of pleasure,
if it does not destroy, yet, in a great measure, enervates all other
good qualities with which a man may be endowed; and as no men have
ever enjoyed higher parts from nature, than the poets, so few, from
this unhappy attachment to pleasure, have effected so little good by
those amazing powers. Of the truth of this observation, the nobleman,
whose memoirs we are now to present to the reader, is a strong and
indelible instance, for few ever had more ability, and more frequent
opportunities, for promoting the interests of society, and none ever
prostituted the gifts of Heaven to a more inglorious purpose. Lord
Rochester was not more remarkable for the superiority of his parts,
than the extraordinary debauchery of his life, and with his
dissipations of pleasure, he suffered sometimes malevolent principles
to govern him, and was equally odious for malice and envy, as for the
boundless gratifications of his appetites.

This is, no doubt, the character of his lordship, confirmed by all who
have transmitted any account of him: but if his life was supremely
wicked, his death was exemplarily pious; before he approached to the
conclusion of his days, he saw the follies of his former pleasures, he
lived to repent with the severest contrition, and charity obliges all
men to believe that he was as sincere in his protestations of
penitence, as he had been before in libertine indulgence. The apparent
sorrow he felt, arising from the stings and compunctions of
conscience, entitle him to the reader's compassion, and has determined
us to represent his errors with all imaginable tenderness; which, as
it is agreeable to every benevolent man, so his lordship has a right
to this indulgence, since he obliterated his faults by his penitence,
and became so conspicuous an evidence on the side of virtue, by his
important declarations against the charms of vice.

Lord Rochester was son of the gallant Henry lord Wilmot, who engaged
with great zeal in the service of King Charles I. during the civil
wars, and was so much in favour with Charles II. that he entrusted his
person to him, after the unfortunate battle of Worcester, which trust
he discharged with so much fidelity and address, that the young King
was conveyed out of England into France, chiefly by his care,
application and vigilance. The mother of our author was of the ancient
family of the St. Johns in