John, Lord Hervey.

As long as curiosity and a cultured cynicism constitute such important elements in the sum total of our human nature, the literature of gossip will never lack readers. Historians have written histories which have fallen dead from their pen, biographers have failed to interest the public in the deeds of their heroes, novelists have excited their imagination in vain, travellers have wandered over distant lands without arousing a desire to follow in their footsteps, yet no work purporting to be a record of the trivial events of daily life in high quarters, of the gossip of the boudoir and the ante-chamber, of spiteful personalities, of the malice, hatred, and all uncharitableness that seethe beneath the calm, polished surface of well-bred society, has ever been written without receiving a cordial reception. From the days when Saint Simon descanted upon the foibles and vanities of the court of the Great Monarch to the malicious pages of the Greville Memoirs of the last generation, the Diaries of all who have had the opportunities of observing how a king folded his neckcloth, how a queen drank her tea, how a maid-of-honour romped with a lord-in-waiting, how a minister crushed his rival by a bon mot, how a bishop toadied and was snubbed, how women of the bed-chamber quarrelled, and the like, have been among the most imperishable productions of literature.

Hume, Lingard, Sismondi, Niebuhr, Hallam, Thiers, and Grote may, in the future, be unread, but as long as language exists the flunkeyism of St. Simon, the invective of Retz, the quaint humour of old Sam Pepys, the wit of Grammont, the fashionable chit-chat of Horace Walpole will always meet with an eager perusal.

Nor is this surprising. In the most brilliant of histories there must necessarily be a certain amount of dryness, but in the diary or memoirs of the courtier history is presented in its easiest and lightest garb. Instead of battles we have stories of the warriors themselves— whom they loved, by whom they were rejected, who paid their debts, who made their fortunes; instead of bills and parliamentary debates we hear how the minister bullied the king, how the king rebuffed the minister, how the queen refused to receive the minister's wife, and how bitter were the feuds in the cabinet; instead of political dissertations, we listen to the current gossip of the hour, which often

throws a stronger light upon the history of the times than all the parliamentary speeches and blue-books put together. Thus to the historical and political writer the contemporary gossip of the diarist is a mine of wealth not to be ignored. What an insight does St. Simon give us into the life of the Court of Louis XIV., how Cardinal Retz brings before us the actors in the civil wars of the Fronde, what a light is thrown upon the days of Charles I. by Mrs. Lucy Hutchinson, upon the days of Charles II. by Reresby and Pepys, upon the days of George II. by Lord Hervey and Horace Walpole, upon the days of George III. by Madame D'Arblay, and upon the days of George IV. and William IV. by Greville!

But of all these mémoires pour servir, there are few that can compare, in novelty of information, in humour, in mordant descriptions of character, in hate and cynicism, with the pages of John, Lord Hervey. Observant, clever, spiteful, the favourite of the hard Queen Caroline gazes upon the Court-life of George II., and comments in his witty, worldly manner upon the scenescivil, ecclesiastical, political, and military-that pass before his sickly view. He lifts the veil, and we see the King listening to the counsels of Sir Robert Walpole, railing at the Queen, and descanting upon the charms of the favourite of his seraglio; we see the Queen, cette diablesse, as the first George kindly called her, worshipping with a devotion worthy of a better cause her little tyrant of a husband, badgering the divines, who led the devotions of the Court, with the most perplexing and heterodox of questions, and mocking with the consciousness of power those who sought to supplant her in the affections of her lord and master; we see Sir Robert Walpole, that minister whom posterity has discovered was not so corrupt as his enemies have alleged, wide awake to his own interests, telling the Queen how he defeated the tactics of the Opposition, bidding her Majesty pay little heed to the transgressions of the King provided she exercise over him the empire of the intellect, and winding up the conversation with one of those stories which drove his modest brother-in-law, Townshend, from the table; we see the Prince of Wales being played upon by Pulteney and Bolingbroke, placing himself at the head of the Opposition, quarrelling in the most unseemly manner with his parents, expelled from the royal presence, and expressing his delight at the news of the approaching dissolution of his mother; we see bishops paying court to mistresses for promotion, lawyers descending to any depths for the prizes of their profession, officers struggling for a star or a ribbon, adventurers doubtful whether to pay court to the King, or Walpole, or the Queen, or to the fat German

women; vanity, ambition, ruthless competition, and sordid vice the only breath in this courtly atmosphere. Last of all we have that death-bed scene so terrible and yet so grotesque in its awful depravity. Who does not know it? The King bending over the couch of his dying consort, sobbing passionately, and vowing to all who hear him that he is losing the best and dearest woman in the world. The Queen bidding him check his grief, and advising him, as so many departing wives advise their husbands without desiring such advice to be followed, to console himself by a second marriage. "Non, non," replies the afflicted and high-minded monarch, "j'aurai des maitresses! J'aurai des maîtresses!" 66 Mais, mon Dieu," answers the fond but easy wife, "cela n'empêche pas!" Was ever tragedy transformed into so repulsive a burlesque !

As is the chronicle so is the chronicler. Le style c'est l'homme. The son of a distinguished peer, the heir to the title by the sudden death of an elder brother, holding an important post in the household of his sovereign, the cherished favourite of the Queen, a man of wit and of considerable culture, John, Lord Hervey appeared to possess all that men envy and women admire. Yet in the cup of his life there was that bitter ingredient which impregnated with its peculiar flavour every drop in the chalice. His health was delicate, he was subject to epileptic fits, and his was one of those nervous, irritable natures that regards every action with suspicion, and every person with malice. Who does not know that venomous portrait of his lordship painted by the acrid hand of the author of the Dunciad'? What reader of the Georgian era does not remember Sporus, that foul and unmanly caricature of Lord Hervey in the 'Epistle to Arbuthnot? The wit sparkles and flashes, but it is the iridescence of putrefaction, not of healthy vitality.

P. "Let Sporus tremble

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What! that thing of silk?
Sporus! that mere white curd of asses' milk?
Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel?
Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?"

P. "Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings,

This painted child of dirt that stinks and stings!
Whose buzz, the witty and the fair annoys;
Yet wit ne'er tastes, and beauty ne'er enjoys;
As well-bred spaniels civilly delight

In mumbling of the game they dare not bite.
Eternal smiles, his emptiness betray,

As shallow streams run dimpling all the way.

Whether in florid impotence he speaks,

And, as the Prompter breathes, the puppet squeaks:
Or at the ear of Eve, familiar toad!

Half froth, half venom, spits himself abroad.

In pun, or politics, or tales, or lies,

Or spite, or smut, or rhymes, or blasphemies,
His wit all seesaw between that and this,'

Now high, now low, now master up, now miss,
And he himself, one vile antithesis.
Amphibious thing! that acting either part,
The trifling head or the corrupted heart.
Fop at the toilet, flatterer at the board,
Now trips a lady, and now struts a lord,
Eve's tempter thus the rabbins have expressed,

A cherub's face-a reptile all the rest!

Beauty that shocks you, parts that none can trust,
Wit that can creep, and pride that licks the dust!"

Cruel and unjust as is the satire, it yet contains sufficient of truth to sting and cling. To prevent the frequent attacks of epilepsy that afflicted him, Lord Hervey lived chiefly on asses' milk and flour biscuits, whilst at the same time, to conceal the ghastly pallor of his complexion, he freely rouged. We thus see the venom in the lines that branded him as "this painted child," "that mere white curd of asses' milk." The literary style of Lord Hervey, though correct and at times even brilliant, is marred by a love of antithesis, which exposed him to the ridicule of the wits of his day, and thus accounts for the poet stigmatising him as "one vile antithesis." Yet if we are to credit the gossip of his contemporaries, Lord Hervey was far from the shallow fribble represented by Pope, or the "half man, half woman described in Pulteney's libel. No unprejudiced mind can peruse the Memoirs without coming to the conclusion that the author was a man of marked intellectual ability, well read in the classics, far-sighted as well as quick-sighted, and of considerable originality of opinion. His oratory, so far from being marked by a "florid impotence," has been reproached as being too grave and solemn, but he was in favour of the ministry, and that was in itself a sufficient offence to create the animosity of Pope. Another evidence of Lord Hervey's talents, and that he was the opposite of the empty, shallow, unmeaning creature depicted by the poet, is to be found in his political contributions. It was the age of pamphlets, and we are told that the brochures penned by Lord Hervey in refutation of the diatribes of Pulteney and Bolingbroke in the Craftsman were, in the opinion of Horace Walpole, equal to any that ever were written. The invective of an enemy is seldom worth seriously examining, but as that terrible portrait of Sporus, whenever the name of Lord Hervey is mentioned, rises vividly before the memory, it may not be idle, perhaps, to show the difference existing between the reality and the envenomed caricature. Pope and Lord Hervey had once been friends, but, for reasons which contemporary gossip could not discover, and which it is therefore useless for posterity to attempt to clear up, they afterwards became

the most bitter foes, and consequently, in listening to the estimate of the one by the other, we require more than the usual grains of salt to correct the acidity of the description.

We have said that Lord Hervey was a man of considerable parts, a wit, a ready writer, a keen and amusing observer of character, but when we have said this we have said all. In a lax age his profligacy was notorious. He was a sceptic, and took the greatest delight in wounding the religious susceptibilities of those he came across. In his creed there was nothing great, nothing noble, nothing of good report; all was hollow, artificial, and insincere. As a necessary consequence of this distorted faith, he believed in nothing, except perhaps himself, and in nobody, except perhaps Queen Caroline. Throughout the pages of his Memoirs detraction is the principal feature. His enemies are of course painted in the blackest colours, their characters picked out in the aqua fortis of hate; but even in his descriptions of his friends there is always something spiteful and malicious, which casts into the shade the praise that may have been bestowed. Everybody is a knave or a sycophant; the world revolves upon the axis of humbug, and between the poles of venality and corruption. A politician is one who identifies his own interests with those of the country; a priest is a scheming hypocrite who makes the best of both worlds, and who would sell his soul for a mitre; justice, truth, morality, and all the other attributes of virtue are only so many masks to conceal motives, and to further the cause of selfadvancement. We rise from the splenetic pages of Lord Hervey with the feelings of a sane man who has been shut up with the afflicted in mind, and who longs to mix again with his sound and healthy fellows, so as to dispel the morbid associations of the past; or with the feelings of one confined in a hothouse, and who craves for the inspiriting breezes on the moorland.

The volumes open with the state of parties on the accession of George II. The House of Hanover has never been noted for the affection that existed between the reigning sovereign and the heirapparent. George I. hated the Prince of Wales; George II. hated the Prince of Wales; George III. hated the Prince of Wales. The consequence was that party feeling divided the nation into two distinct sets, and each party had royalty at its head. If the king was Whig, the adherents of the Prince of Wales were Tories, as was the case under the two first Georges. If the king was a Tory, the followers of the heir-apparent were Whigs, as was the case under the rule of George III. Thus the death of the sovereign always caused a great flutter of excitement amongst the Opposition: the period of rewards, of office, of pensions was to be ushered in. When the news of the death of George I. reached London, great was the delight of Pulteney,

VOL. LIV.

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