notorious Miss Elizabeth Chudleigh, was already a midshipman in the navy. After Augustus came another daughter, Mary, a girl of eighteen, and then two little boys-Frederick, who lived to be Bishop of Derry, and William, a general in the army. These last two were under the charge of a country clergyman, the Rev. Edward Morris; and it is to Lady Hervey's prolonged correspondence with this gentleman, which extends from September, 1742, to a month or two before her death, that we are mainly indebted for our further knowledge of her life. These letters were published in 1821, with a brief memoir and notes by Mr. Croker. Subsequent to Lord Bristol's death, in 1751, they are dated from different places, but up to that time the majority went out from the Suffolk family seat at Ickworth.

Ickworth, or Ickworth Hall, where Lord Hervey died, was not the ancestral home of the Herveys, which, from various reasons, had been allowed to fall into decay. It was a farmhouse in the vicinity, to which in April, 1702, Lord Bristol (then plain John Hervey) had brought his second wife, pending the construction of a better building. But the arrival of a large second family made architectural improvements impossible, and the gradually transformed and extended farmhouse became the "sweet Ickworth" to which Lady Hervey's father-in-law refers so often in his diary. From the copy of an old oil painting prefixed to the volume containing this record, it seems to have been a straggling and battlemented building, standing in a wellwooded park, and having that profusion of chimneys which is popularly supposed to indicate hospitality and good housekeeping. To the left, facing the spectator, is a garden with a sundial, perhaps the very enclosure which Lady Hervey describes to Mr. Morris as contain ing such a show of flowers and sweet shrubs, and to which her care had attracted so numerous a colony of birds. Here also she no doubt planted the rosary mentioned in another letter,

which included "all the sorts of roses there are"-apparently, in 1747, a collection of no more than fifty. Her life at Ickworth must have been a thoroughly peaceful one, and, when she was not occupied in her correspondence with her friends and children, absorbed almost wholly by reading, gardening, riding, or nursing Lord Bristol, whose infirmities (he was now over seventy) had greatly increased with age. Such glimpses as we get of him exhibit a most affectionate and polite old gentleman, much attached to his home and family, but sadly preoccupied with dismal forebodings as to the inevitable ruin of his country. Lady Hervey, who frequently acted as his amanuensis, was evidently very fond of him, but her distaste for the perpetual jeremiads, "which she sometimes hisses and sometimes parodies," peeps out repeatedly in her letters. "When I remind Lord Bristol how long it is since he bespoke my tears for my ruined country, he shakes his head and says, 'Ay, madam! but it is nearer and nearer, and must happen at last," therefore, according to his method, one should begin to weep for one's children as soon as they are born; for they must die at last and every day brings them nearer to it. Let his lordship be a disciple of Heraclitus; I prefer Democritus, and should be glad to have you of the same sect. Ride si sapis." Speaking in one of his minor poems of Woolston, Swift says:

Those Maids of Honor who can read Are taught to use him for their creed.

Here is a quondam maid of honor who can not only read, but quote the ancients at large. Lady Hervey (as Lord Chesterfield said) "understood Latin perfectly well," and her letters to Mr. Morris are freely sprinkled with citations from Horace and Tully (which Mr. Croker obligingly translates). Often they are exceedingly appropriate, as when presently she applies to Lord Bristol the "Plus dolet quam necesse est, qui ante dolet quam necesse est" of Seneca. In the lines

that precede she gives her own cheerful philosophy of life. "I cannot," she says, speaking of politics, “like some people, pass the whole day in sighing, fretting, or scolding about them; I have but a little more time in this world, and I choose rather to follow Anacreon's advice, and

Of a short life the best to make And manage wisely the last stake. The same feeling comes out in her first letter, apropos of Young's then recently published "Night Thoughts." They are excellent, no doubt, but she does not intend to read them again. "I do not like to look on the dark side of life, and shall always be thankful to those who turn the bright side of that lantern to me." It was a similar attitude of mind which predisposed her towards France and things French, where she found that perpetual sunlight and good humor which constituted her fitting environment. "Here," she says later, of Paris, “are coteries to suit one in every humor (except a melancholy one);" and in the same letter she praises a theological discussion as having been conducted with warmth enough for spirit, and not heat enough for ill-temper. In her own religious opinions she evidently inclined to the esprits forts, and she had naturally been much influenced by the opinions of Lord Hervey and the freethinking writers in vogue at the court of the Princess of Wales. Mr. Croker sighs a little over her unorthodox but intelligible partiality for Dr. Conyers Middleton, whose "Life of Cicero" had not only been dedicated to her husband, but even purged by his editorial pen from many of those "low and collegiate phrases," of which, with Lord Chesterfield, Lady Hervey had a horror. But her good sense and good taste alike recoiled from the senseless political parodies of the Liturgy which were current circa 1743, and which even Walpole so far forgot himself as to imitate in his "Lessons for the Day."

Plain sense and an eminently practical intelligence are conspicuous features of these epistles, and not alone in

the comments upon the retention of the Hanoverian troops, and upon the other political complications which wrung the withers of Lord Bristol. In that earthquake mania of 1750 which Mr. Croker describes as "unusually rabid and contagious" Lady Hervey seems to have kept her head, as she also did in that other minor madness which agitated so many people four years later, the case of Elizabeth Cauning. She regarded it, and rightly, "as, on her [Canning's] part, one of the silliest, worse formed, improbable stories she ever met"-which is very much the modern verdict. In her literary leaning there is the same bias to the concrete and useful. Unlike the friend of her youth, Lady Mary, she wholly eschewed the old romances of Scudéry and the rest, and even swelled her Index Expugatorius by classing with them political Utopias like the "Oceana" of Harrington. Of "Tristram Shandy," in common with Goldsmith, Walpole, and other of her contemporaries, she could make nothing. To her it seemed but a "tiresome unsuccessful attempt at humor," only relieved by the excellent sermon of Mr. Yorick, which read like the work of another author. On the other hand, she studies attentively such works as Bolingbroke's "Letters on History," Swift's "Battle of the Books," Berkeley's "Tar Water," Rousseau's "Emile," Montesquieu, Davila, and the Cardinal de Retz-the last of whom she calls her favorite author (she had read him six or seven times), devoting, indeed, more of her time to commentaries on his "Memoirs" than her editor thinks desirable, since there are large excisions at this stage of her correspondence. It is apropos of one of the cardinal's heroes, the Prince of Condé, that she digresses into the following excursus on good humor and good nature, which is a fair specimen of her style in this way. "As I take it" (she says), "good nature is a quality of the soul, good temper of the body: the one always feels for everybody, the other frequently feels for nobody. Good tempers are often soured by ill

ness or disappointments, good nature can be altered by neither: one would choose the one in a companion, the other in a friend. I judge good nature to be the effect of tenderness, and good temper to be the consequence of ease and cheerfulness: the first exerts itself in acts of compassion and beneficence, the other shows itself in equality of humor and compliance."

In "Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Son" a long paragraph is devoted to Lady Hervey, to whom he gives young Stanhope an introduction. The date of the letter is October 22, 1750, at which time she was in Paris, where, indeed, she seems to have resided until the close of the following year. His lordship's admiration of his old friend is unbounded. "She has been bred all her life at courts," he says, "of which she has acquired all the easy goodbreeding, and politeness, without the frivolousness. She has all the reading that a woman should have; and more than any woman need have; for she understands Latin perfectly well, though she wisely conceals it." [Lord Chesterfield had obviously not seen her correspondence with Mr. Morris, where it is rather en évidence.] "No woman," (he goes on) "ever had more than she has, le ton de la parfaitement bonne campagnie, les maniéres engageantes, et le je ne scais quoi qui plait," and he bids his awkward offspring consult her in everything pertaining to good manners. "In such a case she will not put you out of countenance, by telling you of it in company; but either intimate it by some sign, or wait for an opportunity when you are alone together." She will not only introduce him, says his lordship, but ("if one may use so low a word") she will puff him, as she lives in the beau monde. Of this, unhappily, her letters to Mr. Morris of Nutshalling afford no traces. But she was evidently acquainted with many of the personages who figure in Walpole's later letters from the French capital. Her chief friend was Mademoiselle de Charolais, a princess of the blood, with whom she lived much, and she went frequently to the Prince de

An

Conti's charming seat at L'Isle Adam, in the valley of Montmorenci. other intimate was that Duchess d'Aiguillon whose singular fancy led her to translate and recite the "Eloisa to Abelard" of Pope and the "Solomon" of Prior. In the summer of 1751 Lady Hervey was ill, and, like Walpole, testifies to the extreme kindness and solicitude of her French friends, who overpowered her with delicate attentions in the shape of light quilts, couches, easy-chairs, "little chickens out of the country," and "new-laid eggs warm from the hen," all of which things naturally heighten her "reluctance to quit this delightful place [Paris], and most agreeable people." But the only approach to a portrait which she draws for her correspondent is the following pen-sketch of the now venerable Cydias of La Bruyère-the author of the "Pluralité des Mondes." "I dine sometimes" (she says) "with a set of beaux esprits, among which old Fontenelle presides. He has no mark of age but wrinkles, and a degree of deafness; but when, by sitting near him, you make him hear you, he never fails to understand you, and always answers with that liveliness, and a sort of prettiness, peculiar to himself. often repeats and applies his own and other people's poetry very agreeably; but only occasionally, as it is proper and applicable to the subject. He has still a great deal of gallantry in his turn and in his discourse. He is ninety-two, and has the cheerfulness, liveliness and even the taste and appetite of twenty-two." He was two years older than Lady Hervey thought; but he had still six years to live before, in January, 1757, he experienced that final difficulté d'être to which his death-bed words referred.

He

As far as one can judge from the dates of Lady Hervey's letters, it must have been during her absence in Paris at this period that she lost her fatherin-law, who departed this world on January 20, 1751, in his eighty-sixth year. His last communication to her is filled with paternal concern lest her then recent indisposition should have

by,

been promoted by the late hours and good cookery of Paris; and, from the one that immediately preceded it, it seems that forebodings of her impending departure had for the time been distracting him from the misfortunes of his country, since he refers to France as "a corrival" which "hath now prov'd to have had that superior ascendant long apprehended Madam, your Ladyship's disconsolate, faithfull friend and servant, Bristol." Some years previous to his death, and partly in anticipation of the severance from her Suffolk home which that event would involve, Lady Hervey had been rebuilding her London house in St. James's Place, her architect being Henry Flitcroft, the "Burlington Harry" to whom we owe Hampstead Church and St. Giles's-in-the-Fields. Her letters contain frequent references to the progress of this enterprise, and to the prolonged familiarity with compasses, rulers, Greystock bricks, cornices, fascias, copings, and so forth, which her minute supervision of the subject entailed. Besides making it comfortable, her object was to render it as countrified as possible, so as to compensate her, as far as might be, for the loss of the bird-haunted lawns and leafy shrubberies of Ickworth; and as its five windows in a row looked uninterruptedly over the Green Park towards Chelsea (not far from the spot where in 1730 her husband had fought his duel with Pulteney), her desire in this respect was doubtless gratified. The house, which stood between Spencer House and that of Sir John Cope (of Preston Pans), is still in existence, though at a later period it was divided into two. At St. James's Place Lady Hervey resided when she was in town, and here she entertained her particular friends with delightful little dinners, cooked and served à la Française, where the guests would be wits like Walpole or Chesterfield, and philosophers like Hume (who sends her from Edinburgh his account of his quarrel with Rousseau), or M. Helvetius from Paris, whose treatise, "De l'Esprit," is, with Voltaire "Sur la Tolérance," VOL. XII. 579

LIVING AGE.

among the latest literary novelties which her ladyship reports to Mr. Morris. Lord March, afterwards "Old Q," who was also a favorite visitor at the Hôtel de Milady, as he calls it, writes enthusiastically to Selwyn of these charming gatherings. Another of the habitués was Pulteney, both before and after the period when, in Lord Chesterfield's phrase, he "shrunk into insignificancy and an earldom." A passage or two from Lady Hervey's letters at the period of his death in July, 1764, serve to complete and confirm Lord Chesterfield's by no means flattering portrait of their common friend, whose brilliant social gifts seem never to have blinded even his chosen associates to his essentially selfish and sordid character: "He was a most agreeable companion, and a very goodhumored man; but I, that have known him above forty years, knew that he never thought of any one when he did not see them, nor ever cared a great deal for those he did see." "He has left an immense fortune to a brother he never cared for, and always, with reason, despised, and a great deal to a man he once liked, but had lately great reason to think ill of. sorry he is dead; he was agreeable and entertaining; and whenever I was well enough to go down-stairs, and give him a good dinner, he was always ready to come and give me his good company in return. I was satisfied with that; one must take people as they are."

I am

Lord Bath died at eighty-two, and when this letter was written Lady Hervey was sixty-four. She returned to France several times after her first visit, and made excursions into Scotland and its "frightfully dirty" capital. But in later years, as hereditary gout grew upon her, her travels became restricted to such distances as would enable a postchaise to bring her home at the first approach of an attack. Her letters to Mr. Morris, whose friend and benefactor she continued to the last, extend to a little before her death, but she doubtless wrote many others to her favorite daughter Lepel; to her

eldest son, the ambassador; and to his brother, the Augustus Hervey who afterwards became an admiral, which, we suspect, must have been even better reading than many of those to her clerical correspondent. To Mr. Morris, of necessity, she shows only the more serious side of her character, although even her communications to him are sufficient to reveal her as a woman of great intellectual capacity, of very superior ability, and of a happy and cheerful habít of mind. To those she loved she was uniformly affectionate and sympathetíc, and it is not difficult to believe her assertion that she never lost a friend except by death. She herself died in September, 1768. Walpole, who dedicated to her the first three volumes of his "Anecdotes of Painting," and to whom she left a small remembrance in her will, thus writes her epltaph to Mann: "She is a great loss to several persons; her house was one of the most agreeable in London; and her own friendliness, good breeding, and amiable temper had attached all that knew her. Her sufferings with the gout and rheumatism were terrible, and yet never could affect her patience or divert her attention to her friends." There was a miniature of her at Strawberry Hill: but her best likeness in middle life is a portrait by Allan Ramsay, which also belonged to Walpole, and which Lady Hervey probably gave him in return for his own portrait by the same artist. This latter picture of her, as a pleasant-faced elderly lady, is now in the possession of Viscount Lifford, at Broadway, in Worcestershire.

our boyhood, and are still the solace and recreation of our middle age. Though we readily admit the truth in matters mundane of the old proverb, "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,"-that sort of knowledge, we mean, which tempts the parson and perhaps the schoolmaster to dabble in stocks and shares, and our women folk to practise homoeopathy and allopathy alternately on their unsuspecting children and other stray patients, we have shown that there were in bygone days occasions of dire peril when a little timely knowledge of the phraseology of Walter Scott not only stood us in good stead, but saved the skins of a dozen other trembling urchins. In those early days we reaped no small amount of satisfaction from the reflection that the author whose companionship we so dearly enjoyed met with kindly recognition from the power that ruled our destiny, and even had it in our mind that if we were detected in the act of studying "Ivanhoe" when we ought to have been grappling with our Homeric Lexicon, we should try the experiment of appealing unto Cæsar, and plead that the warden himself admitted the existence of a remarkable affinity between the Waverley Novels and the "Iliad." In view of the dire penalties that were attached to novel-reading in school-hours, it was probably as well for us that we were never caught in flagrante delicto; but perhaps the consciousness that we were pursuing knowledge under dangers as well as difficulties rendered the pursuit more entrancing at the time, and gave us a more lasting affection for Walter Scott, as being, so to speak, our accomplice in iniquity.

But at the same time we were tempted to listen more attentively than our classmates, most of whom knew about as much of Scott's novels and poems as they did of the Koran, to the parallels drawn by our instructor between the "Iliad" and the Waverley Novels, and we have a distinct recollection of being told on one occasion that we had saved the honor-so he called it, though it really was the seat of honor -of the class by being able to repeat one