_But Carey must allow for once Exception to this rule, For Middlesex is but a dunce, Though Dorset be a fool._
I quote the verses as they stand, though “dunce” seems scarcely the right description to apply to Lord Middlesex, that dissolute and extravagant man of fashion, who squandered large sums of money upon producing operas, that “proud, disgusted, melancholy, solitary man,” whose conduct savoured so strongly of madness. Certain family characteristics appeared in him which had skipped his father, and his father and he, consequently and not unnaturally, were not on very good terms. The duke, indeed, did not know what to make of his eldest son and heir. “Upon my word, Mr. Cary,” he said, when Mr. Cary asked him loudly at the play whether Lord Middlesex was to undertake the opera again next season, “I have not considered what answer to make to such a question.” Both Lord Middlesex and Lord John being so unsatisfactory, Lord George was, and remained, his father’s favourite. Lord George, in an even greater degree than his father, is an incongruity among the Sackvilles, a departure from type. In spite of all his mistakes, his misjudgments, and his misfortunes, he was a man of greater ability than most of them, of greater energy than the common run of his indolent and pleasure-loving race, of a further-reaching ambition. He did not begin life as the eldest son, coming in due course to be the head of the family, and languidly accepting the civil or diplomatic posts which were pressed upon him; such career as he had he made for himself. Unlike his predecessors or their descendants, he was neither an ambassador, a poet, nor a patron of art or letters—“I have not,” he wrote, “genius sufficient for works of _mere imagination_”—but first a soldier and then a statesman, both disastrously. It is not my intention to go into the details of his public career; my ignorance is too great of the tangle of Georgian politics; nor am I qualified to discuss whether he did or did not disobey his orders at Minden, whether he was or was not largely responsible for the loss of America, whether he did or did not write the _Letters of Junius_; such questions are treated in histories of the period. Nor can I deal with the enormous number of letters on political subjects written both by and to Lord George: I have looked into them more than once, and have come away merely bewildered by the cross-threads of home politics, by the names of remembered or forgotten statesmen, by the fall and reconstruction of Ministries, by the crises of Whigs and Tories. So I judge it best to leave Lord George alone, “hot, haughty, ambitious, and obstinate, a sort of melancholy in his look which runs through all the Sackville family,” and to seek neither to blacken nor to whitewash his character. I scarcely regard him as one of the Sackvilles, perhaps because he broke away from the family traditions into unfamiliar paths, perhaps also because he earned his own peerage, inherited a large house of his own, and led an existence separate from Knole. Living at Knole among its portraits and its legends which grew into the very texture of one’s life, it was, I suppose, inevitable that one should grow up with pre-conceived affections or indifferences, and for some reason Lord George never awakened my interest or my sense of relationship. He was a public character, not a relation.