age more
tragic and mysterious than that which chronicles the closing days of
Thomas, second Lord Lyttelton, whose dissolute life had its fitting
climax of horror at the exact moment foretold to him by a ghostly
visitor. Various and somewhat conflicting accounts are given of this
singular tragedy; but in them all the chief incidents stand out so clear
and unassailable that even such a hard-headed sceptic as Dr Johnson
declared, "I am so glad to have evidence of the spiritual world that I
am willing to believe it."

Thomas, second Lord Lyttelton, son of the first Baron, the distinguished
poet and historian, was the degenerate descendant of five centuries of
Lyttelton ancestors, who had held their heads among the highest in the
county of Worcester since the days of the third Henry. Unlike his
clean-living forefathers, he was famous as a debauchee in a dissolute
age.

"Of his morals," Sir Bernard Burke says, "we may judge by
the fact of his having died the victim of the coarsest
debauchery, and leaving behind him a diary more
disgustingly licentious than the pages of Aratine
himself."

William Coombe, who had been at Eton with Lyttelton, is said to have had
his old schoolfellow in mind when he dedicated his _Diaboliad_ "to the
worst man in His Majesty's Dominions," and when he penned those terrible
lines:--

"Have I not tasted every villain's part?
Have I not broke a noble parent's heart?
Do I not daily boast how I betrayed
The tender widow and the virtuous maid?"

From the days when he wore his Eton jacket the life of this perverse
lord seems to have been one long record of profligacy; at least, until
that day, but six years before its end, when, to quote his own words, "I
awoke, and behold I was a lord!"

"From the time when," Mr Stanley Makower writes,
"although no more than a youth of nineteen, his
engagement to General Warburton's daughter had been
broken off on the discovery of the vicious life he had
led in his travels in France and Italy, he had been a
source of shame and trouble to his family.... To measure
the depths of Lyttelton's vices, it is necessary to read
his own letters, in which the literary style is as
perfect as the fearless admission of fault is
bewildering."

Indeed, even more remarkable than the viciousness of his life, was the
brazen openness with which he flaunted it in the face of the world.