some beef, he is reported to have
answered, 'Beef? oh no! faugh! don't you know I never eat beef, nor
_horse_, nor curry, nor any of those things?' Poor man! it was probably
a pleasant way of turning off what he may have deemed an assault on a
digestion that could hardly conquer any solid food. This affectation
offended Lady Mary, whose _mot_, that there were three species, 'Men,
women, and Herveys'--implies a perfect perception of the eccentricities
even of her gifted friend, Lord Hervey, whose mother's friend she had
been, and the object of whose admiration she undoubtedly was.

Pope, who was the most irritable of men, never forgot or forgave even
the most trifling offence. Lady Bolingbroke truly said of him that he
played the politician about cabbages and salads, and everybody agrees
that he could hardly tolerate the wit that was more successful than his
own. It was about the year 1725, that he began to hate Lord Hervey with
such a hatred as only he could feel; it was unmitigated by a single
touch of generosity or of compassion. Pope afterwards owned that his
acquaintance with Lady Mary and with Hervey was discontinued, merely
because they had too much wit for him. Towards the latter end of 1732,
'The Imitation of the Second Satire of the First Book of Horace,'
appeared, and in it Pope attacked Lady Mary with the grossest and most
indecent couplet ever printed: she was called Sappho, and Hervey, Lord
Fanny; and all the world knew the characters at once.

In retaliation for this satire, appeared 'Verses to the Imitator of
Horace;' said to have been the joint production of Lord Hervey and Lady
Mary. This was followed by a piece entitled 'Letter from a Nobleman at
Hampton Court to a Doctor of Divinity.' To this composition Lord Hervey,
its sole author, added these lines, by way, as it seems, of extenuation.

Pope's first reply was in a prose letter, on which Dr. Johnson has
passed a condemnation. 'It exhibits,' he says, 'nothing but tedious
malignity.' But he was partial to the Herveys, Thomas and Henry Hervey,
Lord Hervey's brothers, having been kind to him--'If you call a dog
_Hervey_,' he said to Boswell, 'I shall love him.'

Next came the epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, in which every infirmity and
peculiarity of Hervey are handed down in calm, cruel irony, and polished
verses, to posterity. The verses are almost too disgusting to be
revived in an age which disclaims scurrility. After the most personal
rancorous invect