'_The most interesting person of the Alcibiades class._' But it is thoroughly characteristic of Pope, that the one solitary trait in the Duke's career which interested _him_, was the fact that a man so familiar with voluptuous splendor should have died on a flock-bed patched with straw. How advantageously does Dryden come forward on this occasion! _He_, as Mr. Bayes, had some bitter wrongs to avenge; and he was left at liberty to execute this revenge after his own heart, for he survived the Duke by a dozen years. Yet he took no revenge at all. _He_, with natural goodness and magnanimity, declined to kick the dead lion. And in the memorable lines, all alive and trembling with impassioned insight into the demoniac versatility of the Duke's character, how generously does he forbear every expression of scorn, and cover the man's frailties with a mantle of comprehensive apology, and, in fact, the true apology, by gathering them together, one and all, as the united results of some secret nympholepsy, or some sacred Pythian inspiration:-- 'Blest madman! that could every hour employ In something new to wish or to enjoy; Now all for rhyming, wenching, fiddling, drinking; Beside ten thousand freaks that died in thinking' Strangely enough, the only Duke of Buckingham that interested Pope was not the Villiers that so profoundly interested Dryden and his own generation, but in every sense a mock Duke of Buckingham, a pantomimic duke, that is known only for having built a palace as fine as gilt gingerbread, and for having built a pauper poem. Some time after the death of the Villiers duke, and the consequent extinction of the title, Sheffield, Lord Mulgrave, obtained a patent creating him, not Duke of Buckingham, but by a pawnbroker's dodge, devised between himself and his attorney, Duke of Buckingham_shire_; the ostensible reason for which, as alleged by himself, was, that he apprehended some lurking claim to the old title that might come forward to his own confusion at a future time, and in that case he was ready with this demur: 'You mistake, I am not _ham_, but ham_shire_.' Such was _his_ account of the matter. Mine is different: I tell the reason thus. He had known the Villiers of old, he knew well how that lubricated gladiator had defied all the powers of Chancery and the Privy Council, for months after months, once to get a 'grip' of him, or a hawk over him. It was the old familiar case of trying to catch a pig (but in this instance a wild boar of the forest) whose tail has been soaped. (See _Lord Clarendon_, not his History but his Life.) What the Birmingham duke therefore really feared was, that the worst room, the tawdry curtains, the flock-bed, &c., were all a pyramid of lies; that the Villiers had _not_ been thrown; had probably _not_ died at all; but was only 'trying it on,' in readiness for a great demonstration against himself; and that, in case the title of Buckingham were ever finally given away,