Hampton Court ... Illustrated with forty-three drawings by Herbert ...

LORD HERVEY 215
they must simper an hour and catch cold in the
Princess's apartment ; from thence (as Shakespeare
has it) to dinner, with what appetite they may; —
and after that, till midnight, walk, work, or think,
which they please. Ican easily believe no lone
house in Wales, with a mountain and a rookery, is
more contemplative than this Court; and as a proof
of itIneed only tell you Miss L. walked with me
three or four hours by moonlight, and we met no
creature of any quality but the King, who gave
audience to the Vice-Chamberlain, all alone under
the garden wall."
Mr. Alexander Pope was very proud of his neat
phrases, for he must needs repeat them next year in
a letter to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
Ill
From Pope to Lord Hervey is an easy step. The
poet was a good hater, a bitter little man, as warped
in mind as inbody, with a talent for artificial pathos
no doubt on occasion, and even some real tears
now and then, but at bottom a cold-hearted fellow
and a bitter. Lord Hervey was much that Pope
could not be, and yet had enough of qualities like
his own to make him doubly obnoxious. He was
strikingly handsome, a man of birth and fashion, a
successful gallant, unscrupulous in " affairs of the
heart," of low morals and with a large spice of aris-