The Project Gutenberg eBook, Dialogues of the Dead, by Lord Lyttelton,
Edited by Henry Morley

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Title: Dialogues of the Dead

Author: Lord Lyttelton

Editor: Henry Morley

Release Date: February 3, 2006 [eBook #17667]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DIALOGUES OF THE DEAD***

Transcribed from the 1889 Cassell & Company edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

DIALOGUES OF THE DEAD.

BY
LORD LYTTELTON.

CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED:
_LONDON_, _PARIS_, _NEW YORK & MELBOURNE_.
1889.

INTRODUCTION.

George, Lord Lyttelton, was born in 1709, at Hagley, in Worcestershire.
He was educated at Eton and at Christchurch, Oxford, entered Parliament,
became a Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1757
he withdrew from politics, was raised to the peerage, and spent the last
eighteen years of his life in lettered ease. In 1760 Lord Lyttelton
first published these "Dialogues of the Dead," which were revised for a
fourth edition in 1765, and in 1767 he published in four volumes a
"History of the Life of King Henry the Second and of the Age in which he
Lived," a work upon which he had been busy for thirty years. He began it
not long after he had published, at the age of twenty-six, his "Letters
from a Persian in England to his Friend at Ispahan." If we go farther
back we find George Lyttelton, aged twenty-three, beginning his life in
literature as a poet, with four eclogues on "The Progress of Love."

To the last Lord Lyttelton was poet enough to feel true fellowship with
poets of his day. He loved good literature, and his own works show that
he knew it. He counted Henry Fielding among his friends; he was a friend
and helper to James Thomson, the author of "The Seasons;" and when acting
as secretary to the king's son, Frederick, Prince of Wales (who held a
little court of his own, in which there was much said about liberty), his
friendship brought Thomson and Mallet together in work on a masque for
the Prince and Princess, which included the song of "Rule Britannia."

Before Lord Lyttelton followed their example, "Dialogues