and whoever can believe such a character to

be theirs I pity still more.'

In return for this came a reply from those attacked called Verses to the Imitator of Horace,' in which Pope was told,

'None thy crabbed numbers can endure,
Hard as thy heart and as thy birth obscure,'

which was quickly followed by a second, named 'Letter from a Nobleman at Hampton Court to a Doctor of Divinity.'

One retort, however, seemed but to beget another, and Pope yet more bitterly painted Lord Hervey, under the name of Sporus, in the vilest colours possible. There could be no doubt but the poet had gained the battle in this war of words, but he never exercised the generosity of a victor. Wherever and whenever opportunity offered, he stung Lord Hervey with an amount of spite happily rare in the history of literature. After about ten years of silence, Lord Hervey, in a poem called 'The Difference between Verbal and Practical Virtue,' flung another missile at his enemy. To this came no reply, so that he had at least the satisfaction of having the last word.

'I SHOULD BE TALKED OF.

37

No doubt the Court in general, and the queen in particular, were much incensed at the onslaught made upon Lord Hervey. The king detested little Mr. Pope,' but not more so than the queen. During her reign the poet continued to sneer at her; and after her death he flung sarcasms at her memory. Her Majesty was too clear-sighted not to see that beneath the effeminacy of Lord Hervey's manners and his affectation of superlative refinement he had a mind capable of giving sound judgment, and a heart that was faithful to his friends. She had need of these, and trusted them in the daily anxieties that beset her, feeling all the more confidence in both, because he opposed her opinions and maintained his own whenever he considered her in the wrong.

She showed him in return more the affection of a mother than a friend. It is well I am so old,' she used to say-she was fourteen years his senior or I should be talked of for this creature.' But if she was not talked of for this creature, her daughter Caroline was. There can be no secrets in a court but time will find out and it is now well known that the Princess

secretly loved the handsome, graceful courtier, whose office obliged him to be continually in her presence.

The queen found in him, not only an adviser, but a companion in whose society it was her delight to pass many hours of the day. In the mornings after breakfast she sent for him, when they talked not so much as sovereign to subject but as friend to friend, of politics, the king, the prince (whom they both heartily disliked), of the court, and town, and all things uppermost at the hour. If His Majesty came in to interrupt them, she would chide Lord Hervey for not having come sooner when she sent for him, so that they might have had a longer chat.

When she drove out to the chase, he rode beside her by her desire. She had presented him with a horse, and added, as a more substantial testimony of her favour, a thousand a year to his income as Vice-Chamberlain. With all this show of royal favour, Lord Hervey was not contented with his position. His ambition was to hold some office of state which would have given his talents more fitting employment than that of detailing court gossip, wiling away the

HER MAJESTY'S FAVOURITE.

39

idle hours of his royal mistress with his wit, or sharing the confidences she gave him. But his desires in this direction were never gratified during the queen's lifetime.

There were reasons for this, however; the first was that Her Majesty was unwilling to spare him from the court. Her intellect was superior to, and she was far better read than, the majority of those who daily surrounded her; and in the interchange of ideas and conversation with her Vice-Chamberlain, she experienced an intellectual relief which gave her a keen sense of pleasure. When at times he had persisted in his opinions on various subjects contrary to hers, and expressed himself with but scant courtesy, she would good-humouredly say he had been impertinent and contradictory because he knew she could not do without him. This favour became the barrier to an appointment in the ministry which he would otherwise have undoubtedly obtained. There was a second reason, however, which hung by the first.

Lord Hervey was a friend of Walpole's, and the astute minister, knowing that the ViceChamberlain possessed the queen's private ear,

did not dare remove him from a position so valuable to himself, which might, in case of his removal, be filled by one of whom he could not make use. Yet if we may judge from some extracts from Lord Hervey's letters, notwithstanding the favour he enjoyed, he found the court occasionally dull enough, and himself sufficiently discontented.

Writing from St. James's to Mrs. Clayton, he says, 'The court removes on Monday after dinner to Hampton Court, so that I shall no longer be obliged to lead the disagreeable stage coachman's life which I have done during their stay at Richmond, and I assure you I have so little of the itinerant fashionable taste of many of my acquaintance that I look on the negative pleasure of fixing with no small comfort. It has often been matter of the utmost astonishment to me what satisfaction it can be to those people whom I see perpetually going from place to place (as others walk backwards and forwards in a room) from no other motive but merely going, for the first seem no more to prefer one corner of the world to another, than the last do this or that end of