the garden wall." The bard of Twickenham was not the only poet who took pleasure in the society of these girlish beauties. They were subscribers to Prior's great volume of 1718, and Gay must also have been among the intimates, for a year later he, too, sends to Mrs. Howard (who was bedchamber woman) his love to both, in addition to which he joins their names in his "Damon and Cupid." "So well I'm known at court"-says his modish Georgian deity—

None ask where Cupid dwells;

But readily resort

To Bellenden's or Lepel's.

In that dancing "Welcome Alexander Pope on His Return from Troy," however, he speaks of the latter lady with more poetry and greater felicity. He couples her with "Hervey, fair of face," as "Youth's youngest daughter, sweet Lepel."

This conjunction in Gay's verses seems to imply that Mr. Hervey's name was already linked to Miss Lepel's in the minds of those who knew them, and not without reason. Early in 1720 -the year of that completion of the "Iliad" which prompted Gay's poemthe lady had been ill, for in March Pope tells Broome that he had been constantly engaged in attending her during her convalescence at Twickenham. Of the nature of this indisposition he says nothing; but in the following month she was married privately to Lord Bristol's second son, the John Hervey above referred to. Hitherto, the date of this occurrence has been more or less matter of guess-work, but the publication of her father-in-law's diary removes all ground for uncertainty. Under date of April 21, 1720, is the following entry by the earl: "Thursday, my dear and hopeful son, Mr. John Hervey, was marryed to Mrs. Mary Le Pell." The marriage was not

1It is impossible to quote Pope's letters with perfect confidence. This anecdote has been accepted

as historical, and probably is so. But it is only right to state that a year later it re-appears, rookery and all, but without Miss Lepel and the vice chamberlain, in a letter to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

at first avowed. "I met Madam Lepell coming into town last night," writes Mrs. Bradshaw to Mrs. Howard on August 21 following. "She is a pretty thing, though she never comes to see me, for which I will use her like a dog," a passage that-besides supplying in its last words unexpected confirmation of the accuracy of Swift's "Polite Conversation"-shows clearly that at this time the facts were still unknown to

many friends. The suggested reason for secrecy is that Mrs. Bellenden had also contracted a clandestine alliance with Colonel Campbell, and that the two couples had "for mutual support agreed to brave the storm together"— the storm anticipated being apparently the royal anger. In Miss Lepel's case,

at all events, it cannot have been parental. "My son," writes Lord Bristol, "has shown ye nicest skill in choosing you, since in you alone he could securely promise himself not only every quality essential to his own happiness, but has also made a wise provision to intaile good sense and virtue (its constant concomitant) on our (now) flourishing family." The date of this letter is May 20, but from an editorial note it appears that the marriage was not publicly announced until October 25, or five months later. How it was received by the court does not transpire. But as it involved the resignation of the two brides, it effectually broke up the little coterie at Hampton, and put an end forever to those pastoral delights of frizelization, flirtation, and dangleation, which, in a letter addressed years afterwards to Mrs. Howard, Lady Hervey includes among the unforgettable diversions of Wren's formal palace by the Thames.

Lord Bristol, who, from his courteous and very copious correspondence, must have been not only an accomplished and a scholarly, but a singularly amiable and affectionate man, appears from the first to have appreciated his son's wife. In the letter quoted he hopes that the newly-married pair will prolong his "declining daies" (he was then fifty-five, and he lived to be eighty-two) by residing

with him. His letters to his "dear daughter" are always couched in the most cordial terms, and it is evident that Lady Hervey became genuinely attached to him. But as regards her husband, one has certainly to fortify oneself by the recollection of Horace and his sic visum Veneri. Everything that one hears of the brilliant and cynical John Hervey, with his "coffinface" and his painted cheeks, his valetudinarian, uncanny beauty, and his notorious depravity of life, makes it difficult to understand what particular qualities in him, apart from opportunity and proximity, could have attracted the affection of a young and beautiful woman, who was, besides, far in advance of her contemporaries in parts and in education. Yet it must be remembered that at this date John Hervey was only four-and-twenty; that it was not until four years later that Pope began to attack him as "Lord Fanny," and that the same poet's portrait of "Sporus”— -a passage of matchless malignity-is fifteen years later still. His health, too, was not yet broken; and it is probable that at this date he exercised to the full that extraordinary gift of fascination which captivated Queen Caroline and Lady Mary, made of his father his blind and doting admirer, and secured the love and respect of a wife, to whom in point of fidelity he was by no means a pattern husband. Perhaps in later years of marriage the respect was stronger than the love. But of the early days of courtship this could not be said. More than a twelvemonth after marriage according to Lady Mary-the billing and cooing of the pair still continued with such unabated vigor as to oblige that austere onlooker to take flight for Twickenham. But, as Lady Mary candidly says, her own talents did not lie in this direction, and she is scarcely an unprejudiced ob

server.

For nearly twenty years we practically lose sight of Mr. Hervey's wife. As has already been said, her maid-ofhonorship came to an end with her marriage, and for a long time she was

rarely at court, although her husband, in his capacity as lord chamberlain, was almost continually in attendance on the queen. It is probable that she was frequently at Ickworth; and Lord Bristol's diary for several years continues to record methodically the births of sons and daughters, with the names of the illustrious sponsors who, in each instance, "answered for them.” In November, 1723, Carr, Lord Hervey, died at Bath, and Mr. Hervey became Lord Hervey. Five years later he went abroad for his health, remaining absent for more than a year, during which time his wife was left behind in her father-in-law's house to mourn his absence, which, from a letter to Mrs. Howard, she seems to have done very genuinely. It is, indeed, chiefly from the Suffolk correspondence that we gain our information about her at this time. Some of her letters are written in a spirit of levity which does not always show her at her best, although she is uniformly amiable and lively. From one of these epistles we get the oft-quoted picture of Swift's "Mordanto"-Lord Peterborough-strolling about Bath in boots, in spite of Nash and the proprieties, cheapening а chicken and cabbage in all the splendors of his blue ribbon and star, and then sauntering away unconcernedly to his lodgings with his marketings under his arm. In another letter from Ickworth we find a reference to Arbuthnot, whom Lady Hervey trusts may not at Tunbridge either lose his money, at quadrille or over-indulge in his favorite John Dory-a taste which he shared with Quin and Fielding. Here and there one detects traces of her love for reading, although her correspondents are not bookish. There are also pleasant and affectionate references to her children. But with her mother-in-law, Lady Bristol, if we are to believe certain references in the Suffolk correspondence, she does not seem to have been always on cordial terms. "Pray," she says to Mrs. Howard, "when you are so kind as to write to me, get sometimes one body, sometimes another, to direct your letters;

for curiosity being one of the reigning passions in a certain person" [obviously, from the context, Lady Bristol], "I love prodigiously both to excite and to baffle it."

From this utterance and other passages it is clear that Lady Hervey's relations with Lady Bristol were at times considerably strained, and, indeed, if contemporary gossip is to be trusted, the antagonism of the two ladies occasionally ripened into actual warfare. But there were also apparently peaceful interspaces, and Lady Suffolk is informed, as an item of extraordinary "news out of the country," that for a whole fortnight Lady Bristol has been all civility and kindness. "I am become first favorite," writes Lady Hervey. "It would puzzle a poet to find anything soft, kind, and sweet enough to liken her to it-down, turtle-doves, and honey are faint images of her disposition."

But

Prob

this can only have been a "Martin's summer" of the elder lady's good-will, for a letter two years later contains a most sarcastic picture of her infirmities, both physical and mental. ably in this quarrel-to quote Sir Roger de Coverley-there was much to be said on both sides. Lady Hervey was too clever a woman not to see and accentuate Lady Bristol's weak points, and she had considerable gifts as an observer when her antipathies were excited. On the other hand, Lady Bristol was by no means deficient in ability. She was both witty and vivacious, and her inordinate letters to her lord during her absences at Bath and at court (she was a lady of the bedchamber to the Princess Caroline), if, as her editor admits, scarcely literary, are at all events easy and natural. They are extravagant in their expressions of affection, and those of Lord Bristol are equally so. But the pair were a curious contrast in many respects. She was a courtier, he was a country gentleman; he delighted in domesticity and fresh air, she in Bath and the racket of the ill-ventilated Pump Room; she gambled freely, he had forsworn cards. To these pecul

iarities on the lady's part may be added a passion for dosing herself with rhubarb on the slightest provocation; a temper as sensitive as a barometer; and a gift of tears which equalled that of Loyola. Yet to the end the letters of this apparently. ill-matched husband and wife are those of newly-married persons, and they occupy two quarto volumes.

In May, 1741, Lady Bristol died suddenly "of a fitt which seized her as she was taking the air in her Sedan in St. James's Parke," the Sedan in question being, as her editor suggests, possibly that very specimen which stands in the entrance-hall of No. 6 St. James's Square, a house which Lady Hervey must often have visited during her father-in-law's tenancy of it.1 With this event Lord Bristol's letters to his "ever new Delight" naturally ceased, and he does not seem to have lamented his loss with the same "terrific length and vehemence" of epistolary regret which, in the case of his first wife, had provoked the rebukes of his father. Two years later he suffered a fresh bereavement in the death of Lord Hervey when Lady Hervey became a widow. Both by his wife and his father Lord Hervey was sincerely mourned. But Lady Hervey refrained from verifying the old saying that short widowhoods follow happy matches, since, although still, to quote her husband's couplet to Lady Mary,

-in the noon of life-those golden days When the mind ripens, ere the form decays,

she never again entered the married state. At Lord Hervey's death her eldest son, George, who was twenty, had become a soldier, not entirely with the approval of his grandfather, who hated standing armies. Lepel, her eldest daughter-"a fine black girl," Horace Walpole calls herwas already married to Mr. Constantine Phipps, afterwards Lord Mulgrave, while her second son, Augustus, later one of the two husbands of the

1 It still belongs to the Bristol family, but was rebuilt in 1819-22.

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 containing such а 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,

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 colleglate 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

Of

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 Canning. 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. "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