the most loveable and accomplished of human beings;
at once poet, philanthropist, and wit; he was also possessed of
chivalric notions, and of daring courage.

Like his royal master, Lord Dorset had travelled; and when made a
gentleman of the bedchamber to Charles II., he was not unlike his
sovereign in other traits; so full of gaiety, so high-bred, so lax, so
courteous, so convivial, that no supper was complete without him: no
circle 'the right thing,' unless Buckhurst, as he was long called, was
there to pass the bottle round, and to keep every one in good-humour.
Yet, he had misspent a youth in reckless immorality, and had even been
in Newgate on a charge, a doubtful charge it is true, of highway robbery
and murder, but had been found guilty of manslaughter only. He was again
mixed up in a disgraceful affair with Sir Charles Sedley. When brought
before Sir Robert Hyde, then Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, his name
having been mentioned, the judge inquired whether that was the Buckhurst
lately tried for robbery? and when told it was, he asked him whether he
had so soon forgotten his deliverance at that time: and whether it would
not better become him to have been at his prayers begging God's
forgiveness than to come into such courses again?

The reproof took effect, and Buckhurst became what was then esteemed a
steady man; he volunteered and fought gallantly in the fleet under James
Duke of York: and he completed his reform, to all outward show, by
marrying Lady Falmouth.[9] Buckhurst, in society, the most good-tempered
of men, was thus referred to by Prior, in his poetical epistle to
Fleetwood Sheppard:--

'When crowding folks, with strange ill faces,
Were making legs, and begging places:
And some with patents, some with merit,
Tired out my good Lord Dorset's spirit.'

Yet his pen was full of malice, whilst his heart was tender to all.
Wilmot, Lord Rochester, cleverly said of him:--

'For pointed satire I would Buckhurst chuse,
The best good man with the worst-natured muse.'

Still more celebrated as a beau and wit of his time, was John Wilmot,
Lord Rochester. He was the son of Lord Wilmot, the cavalier who so
loyally attended Charles II. after the Battle of Worcester; and, as, the
offspring of that royalist, was greeted by Lord Clarendon, then
Chancellor of the University of Oxford, when he took his degree as
Master of Arts, with a kiss.[10] The young nobleman then travelled,
a