As we turn the pages, we come to one name which immediately if whimsically suggests poetry.  The man was, like Touchstone’s Audrey, not poetical and yet a great poet has been pleased to address him, very much as Pindar might have addressed the Ancestral Hero of some mighty tyrant.

    Ah, George Bubb Dodington Lord Melcombe—­no,
    Yours was the wrong way!—­always understand,
    Supposing that permissibly you planned
    How statesmanship—­your trade—­in outward show
    Might figure as inspired by simple zeal
    For serving country, king, and commonweal,
    (Though service tire to death the body, teaze
    The soul from out an o’ertasked patriot-drudge)
    And yet should prove zeal’s outward show agrees
    In all respects—­right reason being judge—­
    With inward care that while the statesman spends
    Body and soul thus freely for the sake
    Of public good, his private welfare take
    No harm by such devotedness.

Thus Robert Browning in Robert Browning’s penultimate book, that “Parleyings with certain people of importance in their day” which fell somewhat coldly upon all save Browning fanatics, and which, when it seemed to show that the poet’s hand had palsied, served only as the discordant prelude to the swan song of “Asolando,” the last and almost the greatest of his glories.  Perhaps only Browning would ever have thought of undertaking a poetical parley with Bubb Dodington.  Dodington is now largely, and not undeservedly forgotten.  His dinners and his dresses, his poems and his pamphlets, his plays and his passions—­the wind has carried them all away.  If Pope had not nicknamed him Bubo, if Foote had not caricatured him in “The Patron,” if Churchill had not lampooned him in “The Rosciad,” he would scarcely have earned in his own day the notoriety which the publication of his “Diary” had in a manner preserved to later days.  If he was hardly worth a corner in the Whartons’ picture-gallery he was certainly scarcely deserving of the attention of Browning.  Even his ineptitude was hardly important enough to have twenty pages of Browning’s genius wasted upon it, twenty pages ending with the sting about

                                     The scoff
    That greets your very name:  folks see but one
    Fool more, as well as knave, in Dodington.

Dodington has been occasionally classed with Lord Hervey but the classification is scarcely fair.  With all his faults—­and he had them in abundance—­Lord Hervey was a better creature than Bubb Dodington.  If he was effeminate, he had convictions and could stand by them.  If Pope sneered at him as Sporus and called him a curd of asses’ milk, he has left behind him some of the most brilliant memoirs ever penned.  If he had some faults in common with Dodington he was endowed with virtues of which Dodington never dreamed.