eld one or two court
offices, gambled, took a wife, and endeavoured to introduce into England
the principals of criticism with which he had found the polite world
occupied in France. He planned a society for refining our language and
fixing its standard. During the troubles of King James's reign he was
about to leave the kingdom, when his departure was delayed by gout, of
which he died in 1684. A foremost English representative of the chief
literary movement of his time, he translated into blank verse Horace's
Art of Poetry, and besides a few minor translations and some short
pieces of original verse, which earned from Pope the credit that

_in all Charles's days
Roscommon only boasts unspotted lays,_

he wrote in heroic couplets an Essay on Translated Verse that was
admired by Dryden, Addison, and Pope, and was in highest honour wherever
the French influence upon our literature made itself felt. Roscommon
believed in the superior energy of English wit, and wrote himself with
care and frequent vigour in the turning of his couplets. It is from this
poem that we get the often quoted lines,

_Immodest words admit of no Defence:
For Want of Decency is Want of Sense._]

[Footnote 5: The other piece with which Addison ranks Popes Essay on
Criticism, was by John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, who was living
when the _Spectator_ first appeared. He died, aged 72, in the year 1721.
John Sheffield, by the death of his father, succeeded at the age of nine
to the title of Earl of Mulgrave. In the reign of Charles II he served
by sea and land, and was, as well as Marlborough, in the French service.
In the reign of James II. he was admitted into the Privy Council, made
Lord Chamberlain, and, though still Protestant, attended the King to
mass. He acquiesced in the Revolution, but remained out of office and
disliked King William, who in 1694 made him Marquis of Normanby.
Afterwards he was received into the Cabinet Council, with a pension of
L3000. Queen Anne, to whom Walpole says he had made love before her
marriage, highly favoured him. Before her coronation she made him Lord
Privy Seal, next year he was made first Duke of Normanby, and then of
Buckinghamshire, to exclude any latent claimant to the title, which had
been extinct since the miserable death of George Villiers, Duke of
Buckingham, the author of the _Rehearsal_. When the _Spectator_ appeared
John Sheffield had just built Buckingham House--now a royal palace--on