The tender widow and the virtuous maid?"

From the days when he wore his Eton jacket the life of this perverse
lord seems to have been one long record of profligacy; at least, until
that day, but six years before its end, when, to quote his own words, "I
awoke, and behold I was a lord!"

"From the time when," Mr Stanley Makower writes,
"although no more than a youth of nineteen, his
engagement to General Warburton's daughter had been
broken off on the discovery of the vicious life he had
led in his travels in France and Italy, he had been a
source of shame and trouble to his family.... To measure
the depths of Lyttelton's vices, it is necessary to read
his own letters, in which the literary style is as
perfect as the fearless admission of fault is
bewildering."

Indeed, even more remarkable than the viciousness of his life, was the
brazen openness with which he flaunted it in the face of the world.

With this depravity were oddly allied gifts of mind and graces of
person, which, but for the handicap of vice, should have made Lord
Lyttelton one of the most eminent and useful men of his time. When he
was at Eton Dr Barnard, the headmaster, predicted a great future for the
boy, whose talents he declared were superior to those of young Fox. In
literature and art his natural endowment was such that he might easily
have won a leading place in either profession; while his gifts of
statemanship and his eloquent tongue might with equal ease have won fame
and high position in the arena of politics.