With the fall of the Ministry on Fox's India Bill in the same year,
Carlisle's official life ended. No public man who attains to Cabinet
rank can be regarded as a failure, and it may be that he was
satisfied with what he had achieved by the age of five-and-thirty.
With a versatility and serenity rare among those who have once felt
the pleasure and excitement of political power and responsibility,
he turned to literature, and at Castle Howard and Naworth he
produced poems and dramas which, in spite of Byron's sharp attack,
who thus avenged himself for the inattention of his guardian on his
entrance to public life,* though they have had no posthumous fame,
gave him a reputation in his day as a man of letters, which was
probably a higher satisfaction than would have been the rewards of a
political career alone. And it threw him into closer connection with
men of literary and artistic tastes and aims. Of his writings the
poem addressed to Reynolds on his resignation of the Presidency of
the Royal Academy is perhaps that which is best worth recollecting.
Carlisle's cultivated mind made him always a liberal patron, and at
the sale of the celebrated Orleans collection of paintings he bought
the greater part.

* Carlisle and Byron were not only guardian and ward, but were
nearly related; it is a singular fact that Carlisle declined to
introduce him in the house of Lords.

Selwyn's letters open with the departure of Lord Carlisle for the
Continent. The young peer was then not quite twenty, but had fallen
desperately in love with Lady Sarah Bunbury. This beautiful and
attractive woman had half London at her feet, including the King.
For obvious constitutional reasons it was impossible for him to
marry her, but day after day the town told how he used to ride to