Surrounded in the Pump-room at Bath by many notable Characters of the Day, mingling in social Chat: Lord Chesterfield, Beau Nash, Horace Walpole, Lord Chatham, the Duchess of Queensberry, Lady Suffolk, etc.

LADY HERVEY'S TRIALS.

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glass. You must have a first and second ante-chamber, and they must have nothing in them but dirty servants. Next must be the grand cabinet, hung with red damask, in gold frames, and covered with eight large and very bad pictures, that cost four thousand pounds. I can not afford them you a farthing cheaper. Under these, to give an air of lightness, must be hung bas-reliefs in marble !”

Much of Lady Hervey's time was also spent at Bath, in a vain endeavor to eradicate an hereditary predisposition to gout from her constitution. She bore this painful malady with great patience; and with similar sweetness of character she sustained those other troubles which, though not mentioned in her letters, can not fail to have vexed her: the devotion which Lord Hervey expressed, and perhaps felt, for Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, could not have been particularly agreeable to an attached wife. While abroad, though it is asserted that most affectionate letters were addressed to Lady Hervey by his lordship, none have been found; while the lines he wrote to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, more like the tender effusions, as even Mr. Croker admits, of a lover of twenty, than of a friend of thirty-three-these remain in all their sentimental elegance.

"Oh! would kind Heaven, these tedious sufferings past,
Permit me, Ickworth, rest and health at last,

In that lov'd shade, my youth's delightful seat,
My early pleasure and my late retreat.

There might I trifle carelessly away

The milder evening of life's clouded day;

From business and the world's intrusion free,

With books, with love, with beauty, and with thee.

*

*

*

But if the gods, sinister still, deny

*

To live in Ickworth, let me there but die;

*

Then came a duel with Pulteney and a quarrel with Pope, both of which events were the talk of the town for many weeks; while Lady Hervey sometimes took refuge in the quiet duties of a country life at Ickworth, or the gossiping circles of Bath, or in the enchantments of Paris.

Lord Hervey's time, too, was incessantly occupied in those ridiculous court cabals which he has himself described with so much humor, notwithstanding his dissipated character, his painted face, his deistical principles, and his valetudinarian habits; his vegetable diet, his bread-sauce, his "milk tea," his

302

A VULGAR MONARCH.

breakfast of dry biscuit, and all those precautions which a hypochondriac adopts, but which an unbelieving healthy friend laughs at. Notwithstanding his premature decay, and the "ridicule made upon him," as he expresses it, by "ignorance, impertinence, and gluttony," Lord Hervey unwittingly, and perhaps unwillingly, captivated the heart of the Princess Caroline, the daughter of George II. Horace Walpole, who knew every thing, found this out; and there are many passages in Lord Hervey's own Memoirs that confirm the fact. There was something, doubtless, soothing in his courtier-like devotion both to the wife and daughter of a monarch who would have been, if not a king, a subject, of the most favorable description, for Sir Cresswell Cresswell and his Divorce Court in these days. Among other anecdotes, one related by Lord Hervey is highly characteristic of his majesty's vulgarity and temper. The queen had ventured, during the king's absence, to take away some very bad pictures out of Kensington Palace, and to substitute some very good ones. There was a certain fat Venus, painted like a sign-post, that his majesty preferred to all the Vandykes in the world, and especially to "three nasty children," as he styled them (probably those of Charles I.), that the queen had hung up near a door, and he ordered them to be taken away. While the queen, her daughter, and Lord Hervey were talking about this the next morning, the king came into the gallery, and staid about five minutes. He "snubbed the queen, who was drinking chocolate, for being always stuffing; the Princess Emily for not hearing him; the Princess Caroline for being grown fat; the Duke (of Cumberland) for standing awkwardly; Lord Hervey for not knowing what relation the Prince of Sultzbach was to the elector palatine and then carried the queen to walk, and be resnubbed in the garden. The pictures were altered according to the king's direction soon after: the excuse Lord Hervey made for their not being done that morning, was the man's being out of the way who was always employed on these occasions."

It appears, however, that the Princess Caroline was not only the object of Lord Hervey's regard but of that of his wife, which was continued to her royal highness many years after the death of Hervey; and with respect to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, that their correspondence, which was returned to her by Lord Hervey's son, George, showed that a long and steady friendship between two persons of different sexes might exist for many years without love. Lord Hervey professed to admire women who were no longer young; and Lady Mary was, during his gallant attentions to her, past forty-seven:

THE LAST MILES OF LIFE.

"Just in the noon of life, those golden days

When the mind ripens ere the form decays."

She was six years his senior.

303

The decline and death of her husband may therefore be supposed to have given Lady Hervey far greater concern than these platonic attachments, toward which she seems to have entertained no aversion. During the year 1742 Lord Hervey's health continued to decline. "When I say that I am still alive, and am still privy seal," he wrote to Lady Mary Wortley at Avignon, "it is all I can say for the pleasures of the one or the honor of the other." He next complains that he had been three weeks ill of a fever, "an annual tax that his detestable constitution paid to this detestable climate every spring." He was then, he wrote, in easy circumstances; Lepell, his second daughter, was recently married to the Hon. Constantine Phipps, afterward Earl of Mulgrave. The Duchess of Buckingham had left him (Lord Hervey) Buckingham House and all the furniture and plate for his life-but that life was rapidly waning away. "The last stages of a mournful life," he wrote in June, 1743, "are filthy roads, and, like all other roads, I find the farther one goes from the capital the more tedious the miles grow, and the more rough and disagreeable the way." Yet he was then at Ickworth: "I know," he adds, "of no turnpikes to mend them; but doctors who have the management of it, like the commissioners for most other turnpikes, seldom execute what they undertake; they only put the toll of the poor cheated passenger in their pockets, and leave every jolt at least half as bad as they find it, if not worse." This sentence formed a part of his last letter to his distant friend. Lord Hervey died on the 8th of August, 1743. Lady Hervey remained with Lord Bristol till his death, which took place in 1751. She acted toward him with the duty and affection of a daughter. In the October of the same year in which he died, writing to the Rev. Edward Morris, who had been tutor to her sons, in a strain of mingled sorrow and philosophy—

66

"They," she writes, are insensible who do not feel their own misfortunes; but they are weak who do not struggle with them; and true philosophy consists in making life worth our care, not in thinking it below it. The misfortunes Mrs. P. can have met with are few and slight compared to those I have experienced: I see and feel the greatness of this last in every light, but I will struggle to the utmost; and though I knowat least I think--I can never be happy again, yet I will be as little miserable as possible, and will make use of the reason I have to soften, not to aggravate my affliction. I hope she will do the same, for I wish her happiness as sincerely, as warmly as I do my own."

304

LADY HERVEY'S WIDOWHOOD.

Many sources of interest, however, in some measure supplied the place of a husband who was unworthy of so much regret. Four sons-George, Augustus, Frederick, William, successively Earls of Bristol-and four daughters, Lady Mulgrave, Lady Mary Fitzgerald, and two who died unmarried, survived their father. On the youngest, Lady Caroline, Churchill wrote these lines, which seem to indicate that the graces of Lady Hervey descended to this her youngest daughter:

"That face, that form, that dignity, that ease,

Those powers of pleasing, with that will to please,
By which Lepell, when in her youthful days,
Even from the currish Pope extorted praise,
We see transmitted in her daughter shine,
And view a new Lepell in Caroline!"

Lady Hervey appears afterward to have returned in some measure to the world, for in 1765, only three years before her death, Horace Walpole writes the most amusing apology to her for his absence from some reception at her house. He complains that it was scandalous at his age to be carried backward and forward to balls and suppers and parties as he was; his resolutions of growing old were admirable; he always awoke with a sober plan, and ended the day in dissipation. But he promises his old friends to begin to be between forty and fifty by the time he was fourscore; and he believed he should keep to his resolution, not having chalked out any business that would take him above forty years more; "so that if he did not get acquainted with the grandchildren of all the present age, he hoped still to lead a sober life before he died." We find him also talking of two new fashions brought by Lady Hervey from Paris; the one a tin funnel covered with green ribbon, holding water, in which the ladies kept their bouquets fresh: he feared they would take frequent colds in overturning this reservoir. The other he half playfully, half angrily insists on, since Marshal Saxe was victorious in Flanders over our troops, and declares we must step out of the high pantouffles that were made for us by those cunning shoemakers at Ramilies and Poitiers, and go clumping about, perhaps, in wooden shoes. "My Lady Hervey, who, you know, dotes upon every thing French, is charmed with the hopes of these new shoes, and has already ordered herself a pair of pigeonwood." This letter was written shortly after one of Lady Hervey's last visits to Paris, where, among other agreeable visits, she had passed some days at L'Isle Adam, in the Valley of Montmorenci, with the Prince and Princesse de Conti. Her description of the kindness of the French (in the classes superior in intelligence and character) may be echoed in the