DIALOGUES OF THE DEAD.


BY
LORD LYTTELTON.

CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED:
_LONDON_, _PARIS_, _NEW YORK & MELBOURNE_.
1889.




INTRODUCTION.


George, Lord Lyttelton, was born in 1709, at Hagley, in Worcestershire.
He was educated at Eton and at Christchurch, Oxford, entered Parliament,
became a Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1757
he withdrew from politics, was raised to the peerage, and spent the last
eighteen years of his life in lettered ease. In 1760 Lord Lyttelton
first published these "Dialogues of the Dead," which were revised for a
fourth edition in 1765, and in 1767 he published in four volumes a
"History of the Life of King Henry the Second and of the Age in which he
Lived," a work upon which he had been busy for thirty years. He began it
not long after he had published, at the age of twenty-six, his "Letters
from a Persian in England to his Friend at Ispahan." If we go farther
back we find George Lyttelton, aged twenty-three, beginning his life in
literature as a poet, with four eclogues on "The Progress of Love."