ROSCOMMON, WENTWORTH DILLON, Earl of, a celebrated poet of the seventeenth century, was the son of James Dillon, Earl of Roscommon, and was born in Ireland about 1634, under the administration of the Earl of Strafford, who was his uncle, and from whom he received the name of Wentworth. He passed his infancy in Ireland; after which the Earl of Strafford sent for him to England, and placed him at his own seat in Yorkshire, under the tuition of Dr Hall, who instructed him in Latin, without teaching him the common rules of grammar, which he could never retain in his memory, though he learned to write in that language with classical elegance and propriety. On the Earl of Strafford's being impeached, he went to complete his education at Caen in Normandy; and after some years he travelled to Rome, where he became well skilled in medals and in the Italian language. He returned to England soon after the Restoration, and was made captain of the band of pensioners; but a dispute with the lord privy-seal about a part of his estate obliged him to resign his post and revisit his native country, where the Duke of Ormond appointed him captain of the guards. He was unhappily very fond of gaming; and as he was returning to his lodgings from a gaming-table in Dublin, he was attacked in the dark by three ruffians who were employed to assassinate him. The earl defended himself with such resolution that he had despatched one of the aggressors, when a gentleman came up and disarmed another, on which the third took to flight. This generous assistant was rewarded for his bravery by Roscommon resigning to him his post of captain of the guards. His lordship at length returned to London, when he was made master of the horse to the Duchess of York, and married the Lady Frances, the eldest daughter of Richard, Earl of Burlington, and the widow of Colonel Courtney. Here he distinguished himself by his writings; and, in imitation of those learned and polite assemblies with which he had been acquainted abroad, he began to form a society for refining and fixing the standard of the English language, in which his great friend Dryden was a principal assistant. In 1683 he was seized with the
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Rosellini. gout, which, by improper medical treatment, led to his death, which happened in the month of January 1684. He was buried with great pomp in Westminster Abbey.
His poems, which are not numerous, are in the body of English poetry collected by Dr Johnson. His Essay on Translated Verse (1684), and his translation of Horace's Art of Poetry (1680), have been much commended. Upon the latter, Waller addressed a poem to his lordship when he was seventy-five years of age. "In the writings of this nobleman we view," says Fenton, "the image of a mind naturally serious and solid; richly furnished and adorned with all the ornaments of art and science; and these ornaments unaffectedly disposed in the most regular and elegant order. His imagination might probably have been more fruitful and sprightly, if his judgment had been less severe; but that severity (delivered in a masculine, clear, succinct style) contributed to make him so eminent in the didactical manner, that no man with justice can affirm he was equalled by any of our nation, without confessing at the same time that he is inferior to none. In some other kinds of writing his genius seems to have wanted fire to attain the point of perfection; but who can attain it? He was a man of an amiable disposition, as well as a good poet; as Pope, in his Essay on Criticism, has testified in the following lines:—
"Roscommon, not more learned than good,
With manners generous as his noble blood;
To him the wit of Greece and Rome was known,
And every author's merit but his own."
Roscommon enjoys the distinction of being the only correct writer in verse before the time of Addison; and if there are not so many or so great beauties in his composition as in those of some contemporaries, there are at least fewer faults. "Of Roscommon's works," says Johnson (Lives of the Poets), "the judgment of the public seems to be right. He is elegant, but not great; he never labours after exquisite beauties, and he seldom falls into gross faults. His versification is smooth, but rarely vigorous; and his rhymes are remarkably exact. He improved taste if he did not enlarge knowledge, and may be numbered among the benefactors to English literature."