lassic. Queen Caroline was too cultivated
herself to suffer fools about her, and Lord Hervey was a man after her
own taste; as a courtier he was essentially a fine gentleman; and, more
than that, he could be the most delightful companion, the most sensible
adviser, and the most winning friend in the court. His ill-health, which
he carefully concealed, his fastidiousness, his ultra-delicacy of
habits, formed an agreeable contrast to the coarse robustness of 'Sir
Robert,' and constituted a relief after the society of the vulgar,
strong-minded minister, who was born for the hustings and the House of
Commons rather than for the courtly drawing-room.

John Lord Hervey, long vice-chamberlain to Queen Caroline, was, like Sir
Robert Walpole, descended from a commoner's family, one of those good
old squires who lived, as Sir Henry Wotton says, 'without lustre and
without obscurity.' The Duchess of Marlborough had procured the
elevation of the Herveys of Ickworth to the peerage. She happened to be
intimate with Sir Thomas Felton, the father of Mrs. Hervey, afterwards
Lady Bristol, whose husband, at first created Lord Hervey, and
afterwards Earl of Bristol, expressed his obligations by retaining as
his motto, when raised to the peerage, the words 'Je n'oublieray
jamais,' in allusion to the service done him by the Duke and Duchess of
Marlborough.

The Herveys had always been an eccentric race; and the classification of
'men, women, and Herveys,' by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, was not more
witty than true. There was in the whole race an eccentricity which
bordered on the ridiculous, but did not imply want of sense or of
talent. Indeed this third species, 'the Herveys,' were more gifted than
the generality of 'men and women.' The father of Lord Hervey had been a
country gentleman of good fortune, living at Ickworth, near Bury in
Suffolk, and representing the town in parliament, as his father had
before him, until raised to the peerage. Before that elevation he had
lived on in his own county, uniting the character of the English squire,
in that fox-hunting county, with that of a perfect gentleman, a scholar,
and a most admirable member of society. He was a poet, also, affecting
the style of Cowley, who wrote an elegy upon his uncle, William Hervey,
an elegy compared to Milton's 'Lycidas' in imagery, music, and
tenderness of thought. The shade of Cowley, whom Charles II. pronounced,
at his death, to be 'the best man in England,' haunte