'
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 perversion 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,' written 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 censure--a 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. He has pulled down all that
nature raised in him, and built himself up again after a model of his
own. He has dammed up all those lights that nature made into the noblest
prospects of the world, and opened other little blind loopholes backward
by turning day into night, and night into day.
Pages:
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90