For Love doth seldom Hope survive.
My heart may languish for a time,
As all beauties in their prime
Have justified such cruelty,
By the same fate that conquered me.
When age shall come, at whose command
Those troops of beauty must disband--
A rival's strength once took away,
What slave's so dull as to obey?
But if you'll learn a noble way
To keep his empire from decay,
And there for ever fix your throne,
Be kind, but kind to me alone.'

Like his father, who ruined himself by building, Villiers had a
monomania for bricks and mortar, yet he found time to write 'The
Rehearsal,' a play on which Mr. Reed in his 'Dramatic Biography' makes
the following observation: 'It is so perfect a masterpiece in its way,
and so truly original, that notwithstanding its prodigious success, even
the task of imitation, which most kinds of excellence have invited
inferior geniuses to undertake, has appeared as too arduous to be
attempted with regard to this, which through a whole century stands
alone, notwithstanding that the very plays it was written expressly to
ridicule are forgotten, and the taste it was meant to expose totally
exploded.'

The reverses of fortune which brought George Villiers to abject misery
were therefore, in a very great measure, due to his own misconduct, his
depravity, his waste of life, his perversion of noble mental powers: yet
in many respects he was in advance of his age. He advocated, in the