LYTTELTON, George, Lord (1709-1773), statesman and man of letters, born at Hagley, Worcestershire, in 1709, was a descendant of the great Thomas de Littleton (7.v.), and the eldest son of Sir Thomas Lyttelton, Bart., who at the Revolution of 1688 and during the following reign was one of the ablest Whig debaters of the House of Commons. Lyttelton was educated at Eton and Oxford, and in 1728 set out on the grand tour, spending considerable periods at Paris and Rome. On his return to England he sat for Okehampton, Devonshire, beginning public life in the same year with Pitt; and from 1744 to 1754 he held the office of a lord commissioner of the treasury. In 1755 he succeeded Legge as chancellor of the exchequer, but in the following year he quitted office, on which occasion he was raised to the peerage as Lord Lyttelton, baron of Frankley, in the county of Worcester. In the political crisis of 1765, before the formation of the Rockingham administration, it was at one time suggested that he might be placed at the head of the treasury, but he firmly declined to take part in any such scheme. The closing years of his life were devoted chiefly to literary pursuits. He died on August 22, 1773....
Lyttelton’s earliest publication (1735), Letters from a Persian in England to his Friend at Ispahan, appeared anonymously. Much greater celebrity was achieved by his Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of St Paul, also anonymous, published in 1747. It takes the form of a letter to Gilbert West, and is designed to show that St Paul’s conversion is of itself a sufficient demonstration of the divine character of Christianity. The drift of the argument is that it is equally inconceivable that the apostle could have been the victim or the originator of a cheat, and that therefore he must have been divinely inspired. It is interesting to know that Dr Johnson regarded the work as one “to which infidelity has never been able to fabricate a specious answer.” Lord Lyttelton’s Dialogues of the Dead, a creditable performance, though hardly rivalling either Lucian or Landor, appeared in 1760. His History of Henry II. (1764-67), the fruit of twenty years’ labour, is not now cited as an authority, but is painstaking and fair. Lyttelton was also a writer of verse; his Monody on his wife’s death has been praised by Gray for its elegiac tenderness, and his Prologue to the Coriolanus of his friend Thomson shows genuine feeling. He was also the author of the well-known stanza in the Castle of Indolence, in which the poet himself is described. A complete collection of the Works of Lord Lyttelton was published after his death by his nephew, G. E. Ayscough. See Memoirs and Correspondence of Lord Lyttelton, 1734-1773 (2 vols., 1845).
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