Be  kind,  but  kind  to  mc  alone'

Like  his  father,  who  ruined  himself  by  building,  Villiers  had
a  monomania  for  bricks  and  mortar,  yet  he  found  time  to
write  *  The  Rehearsal,*  a  play  on  which  Mr.  Reed  in  his
*  Dramatic  Biography'  makes  the  following  observation  :  *  It
is  so  perfect  a  masterpiece  in  its  way,  Jlnd  so  truly  original,  that
notwithstanding  its  prodigious  success,  even  the  task  of  imita-
tion, which  most  kinds  of  excellence  have  invited  inferior  ge-
niuses to  undertake,  has  appeared  as  too  arduous  to  be
attempted  with  regard  to  this,  which  through  a  whole  century


A  fearful  Censure.  27

stands  alone,  notwithstanding  that  the  very  plays  it  was  written
expressly  to  ridicule  are  forgotten,  and  the  taste  it  was  meant
to  expose  totally  exploded.*

The  reverses  of  fortune  which  brought  George  Villiers  to
abject  misery  were  therefore,  in  a  very  great  measure,  due  to
-  his  own  misconduct,  his  depravity,  his  waste  of  life,  his  per-
version of  noble  mental  powers :  yet  in  many  respects  he  was
in  advance  of  his  age.  He  advocated,  in  the  House  of  Lords,
toleration  to  Dissenters.  He  wrote  a  *  Short  Discourse  on  the
Reasonableness  of  Men's  having  a  Religion,  or  Worship  of
God ;'  yet,  such  was  his  inconsistency,  that  in  spite  of  these
works,  and  of  one  styled  a  *  Demonstration  of  the  Deity,'  writ-
ten a  short  time  before  his  death,  he  assisted  Lord  Rochester
in  his  atheistic  poem  upon  *  Nothing.*

Butler,  the  author  of  Hudibras,  too  truly  said  of  Villiers
*  that  he  had  studied  the  whole  body  of  vice;^  a  most  fearful  cen-
sure— 2i.  most  significant  description  of  a  bad  man.  *  His  parts,*
he  adds,  *  are  disproportionate  to  the  whole,  and  like  a  monster,
he  has  more  of  some,  and  less  of  others,  than  he  should  have.
