ostensive indelicacy; he complains that he has no companion in that part of the world, no Sir Charles Sedleys, nor Buckinghams, and what is still worse, even deprived of the happiness of a mistress, for, the women there, he says, are so coy, and so narrowly watched by their relations, that there is no possibility of accomplishing an intrigue.  He mentions, however, one Monsieur Hoffman, who married a French lady, with whom he was very great, and after the calamitous accident of Mr. Hoffman’s being drowned, he pleasantly describes the grief of the widow, and the methods he took of removing her sorrow, by an attempt in which he succeeded.  These two letters discover the true character of Etherege, as well as of the noble person to whom they were sent, and mark them as great libertines, in speculation as in practice.

As for the other compositions of our author, they consist chiefly of little airy sonnets, smart lampoons, and smooth panegyrics.  All that we have met with more than is here mentioned, of his writing in prose, is a short piece, entitled An Account of the Rejoicing at the Diet of Ratisbon, performed by Sir George Etherege, Knight, residing there from his Majesty of Great Britain, upon Occasion of the Birth of the Prince of Wales; in a Letter from himself, printed in the Savoy 1688.  When our author died, the writers of his life have been very deficient; Gildon says, that after the Revolution, he followed his master into France, and died there, or very soon after his arrival in England from thence.  But there was a report (say the authors of the Biograph.  Brit. which they received from an ingenious gentleman) ’that Sir George came to an untimely death, by an unlucky accident at Ratisbon, for, after having treated some company with a liberal entertainment at his house there, when he had taken his glass too freely, and, being through his great complaisance too forward, in waiting on his guests at their departure, flushed as he was, he tumbled down stairs, and broke his neck, and so fell a martyr to jollity and civility.’

One of the earliest of our author’s lesser poems, is that addressed to her Grace the Marchioness of Newcastle, after reading her poems, and as it is esteemed a very elegant panegyric, we shall give the conclusion of it as a specimen.

  While we, your praise, endeavouring to rehearse,
  Pay that great duty in our humble verse;
  Such as may justly move your anger, now,
  Like Heaven forgive them, and accept them too. 
  But what we cannot, your brave hero pays,
  He builds those monuments we strive to raise;
  Such as to after ages shall make known,
  While he records your deathless fame his own: 
  So when an artist some rare beauty draws,
  Both in our wonder there, and our applause. 
  His skill, from time secures the glorious dame,
  And makes himself immortal in her fame.

Besides his Songs, little panegyrical Poems and Sonnets, he wrote two Satires against Nell Gwyn, one of the King’s mistresses, though there is no account how a quarrel happened between them; the one is called Madam Nelly’s Complaint, beginning,