Like his royal master, Lord Dorset had travelled; and when made a gentleman of the bedchamber to Charles II., he was not unlike his sovereign in other traits; so full of gaiety, so high-bred, so lax, so courteous, so convivial, that no supper was complete without him:  no circle ‘the right thing,’ unless Buckhurst, as he was long called, was there to pass the bottle round, and to keep every one in good-humour.  Yet, he had misspent a youth in reckless immorality, and had even been in Newgate on a charge, a doubtful charge it is true, of highway robbery and murder, but had been found guilty of manslaughter only.  He was again mixed up in a disgraceful affair with Sir Charles Sedley.  When brought before Sir Robert Hyde, then Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, his name having been mentioned, the judge inquired whether that was the Buckhurst lately tried for robbery? and when told it was, he asked him whether he had so soon forgotten his deliverance at that time:  and whether it would not better become him to have been at his prayers begging God’s forgiveness than to come into such courses again?

The reproof took effect, and Buckhurst became what was then esteemed a steady man; he volunteered and fought gallantly in the fleet under James Duke of York:  and he completed his reform, to all outward show, by marrying Lady Falmouth.[9] Buckhurst, in society, the most good-tempered of men, was thus referred to by Prior, in his poetical epistle to Fleetwood Sheppard:—­

    ’When crowding folks, with strange ill faces,
     Were making legs, and begging places: 
     And some with patents, some with merit,
     Tired out my good Lord Dorset’s spirit.’

Yet his pen was full of malice, whilst his heart was tender to all.  Wilmot, Lord Rochester, cleverly said of him:—­

    ’For pointed satire I would Buckhurst chuse,
     The best good man with the worst-natured muse.’

Still more celebrated as a beau and wit of his time, was John Wilmot, Lord Rochester.  He was the son of Lord Wilmot, the cavalier who so loyally attended Charles II. after the Battle of Worcester; and, as, the offspring of that royalist, was greeted by Lord Clarendon, then Chancellor of the University of Oxford, when he took his degree as Master of Arts, with a kiss.[10] The young nobleman then travelled, according to custom; and then most unhappily for himself and for others, whom he corrupted by his example, he presented himself at the court of Charles II.  He was at this time a youth of eighteen, and one of the handsomest persons of his age.  The face of Buckhurst was hard and plain; that of De Grammont had little to redeem it but its varying intelligence; but the countenance of the young Earl of Rochester was perfectly symmetrical:  it was of a long oval, with large, thoughtful, sleepy eyes; the eyebrows arched and high above them; the brow, though concealed by the curls of the now modest wig, was high and smooth; the nose, delicately shaped,