Page:The Earliest English Translations of Bürger's Lenore - A Study in English and German Romanticism - Emerson (1915).djvu/47

 translation for her designs, was William Robert Spencer, son of Charles Spencer, second son of the third Duke of Marlborough. Educated at Harrow and Oxford he lived without taking part in public life, or distinguishing himself in any way except as a social favorite. As such he was the friend of statesmen like Pitt and Fox and Sheridan, as he was later to be the friend of Byron and Moore and the London representatives of the new literature. Beginning with his translation of Bürger, too, he was to be something of a minor poet, as well as a wit and popular member of society. His "occasional verse" was to be warmly praised by Scott, Byron, and Christopher North. Hogg, quoted by Christopher North in Blackwood's, said of his Beth Gelert or the Grave of a Greyhound: "That chiel's a poet; those verses hae muckle o the auld ballart pathos and simplicity.

It was this Spencer who, about a decade later, lent Moore his pistols for the duel with Jeffrey. Spencer's friendship with Byron was also intimate. Byron, Moore, and he were the only literary men admitted to Watier's Club, which was anything but literary. Yet long before this hobnobbing with the later generation of poets, Spencer had ceased to admire German romanticism, for in 1802 he burlesqued the German ghost literature in a play called Urania, which was performed at Drury Lane theatre. He published volumes of poems in 1804 and 1811, while a collected edition appeared in 1835, a year after his death.

Lady Diana Beauclerk, who had become interested in Mr. Stanley's translation because it furnished subjects for her pencil, was the eldest daughter of Charles Spencer, third Duke of Marlborough, and was thus Mr. W. R. Spencer's aunt. She married first