Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/181

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and its Green Border-Land.
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noblemen of England. The founder of this distinguished family, whose very name has a literary sound, or rather the first who attained to a peerage, was Lord George Lyttelton, who was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1757, but who was more thoroughly acquainted with figures of rhetoric than those of arithmetic. He was a man of cultivated and refined taste in literature, art, and nature. He was the author of various works, and produced poems of much merit both on paper and on gardens and lawns of exquisite culture. He was a generous and genial patron of these two kinds of literature, and attracted the companionship, and encouraged the labours, and stimulated the genius of eminent writers and artists. There are several monuments standing among the trees of the park, erected to some of these poets and men of mark. The present Lord Lyttelton, a greater, if not more productive, scholar than the ancestor who first won the title he has inherited, is a man of large and active ability, which he devotes to every good word and work for the well-being of the people, especially the working classes. He is not only a scholar by reputation and past attainments, but as a continuous and active student, who, perhaps, has played a little more with his learning than is meet in this practical age; or translated more from English verse into Greek and Latin than from Greek and Latin into English. Still, he