Lyttelton, GEORGE, LORD

Lyttelton, GEORGE, LORD, son of Sir Thomas Lyttelton of Hagley, in Worcestershire, was born in 1709, and educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. He entered parliament in 1730, where he soon acquired eminence as a speaker, held several high political offices, was raised to the peerage in 1759, and died 22d August 1773. Lyttelton had once a considerable reputation as an author, and his poetry gained him a place in Johnson's Lives of the Poets. His best-known prose works are Observations on the Conversation and Apostleship of St Paul (1747), Dialogues of the Dead (1760), and History of Henry II. (1764). See his Memoirs and Correspondence (2 vols. 1845).—His son, THOMAS, LORD LYTTELTON (1744–79), who was as conspicuous for profligacy as his father for virtue, died three days after a nocturnal warning by a dove and a white lady (Chambers's Book of Days, vol. ii. p. 625). The Poems by a Young Nobleman (1780) may partly at least have been his, but the Letters of the late Lord Lyttelton (2 vols. 1780–82) were probably by Combe ('Dr Syntax'). A Quarterly reviewer (1851) identified him with 'Junius.'