Spencer, WILLIAM ROBERT

Spencer, WILLIAM ROBERT, minor poet, was second son of Lord Charles Spencer, himself the second son of that Charles Spencer, fifth Earl of Sunderland, who succeeded as third Duke of Marlborough in 1733. He was born in 1770, was educated at Harrow and Oxford, held a Commissioner-ship of Stamps, spent his last ten years in Paris, and died there in 1834. Among his children were Aubrey-George Spencer, Bishop of Jamaica, and George-John-Trevor, Bishop of Madras. He was long a fashionable writer of vers de société and such like, but his fashionable verse is clean forgotten, and his name lives alone in a few simple songs and ballads, the chief 'Beth Gélerit, or the Grave of the Greyhound.' Yet even these are but commonplace. His poems were collected, with a brief Memoir, in 1835.