in this office as ever filled it since it was
erected. There is one benefit, however, I enjoy from this loss of my
court interest, which is, that all those flies which were buzzing about
me in the summer sunshine and full ripeness of that interest, have all
deserted its autumnal decay, and from thinking my natural death not far
off, and my political demise already over, have all forgot the death-bed
of the one and the coffin of the other.'

Again he wrote to her a characteristic letter:--

'I have been confined these three weeks by a fever, which is a sort of
annual tax my detestable constitution pays to our detestable climate at
the return of every spring; it is now much abated, though not quite gone
off.'

He was long a helpless invalid; and on the 8th of August, 1743, his
short, unprofitable, brilliant, unhappy life was closed. He died at
Ickworth, attended and deplored by his wife, who had ever held a
secondary part in the heart of the great wit and beau of the court of
George II. After his death his son George returned to Lady Mary all the
letters she had written to his father: the packet was sealed: an
assurance was at the same time given that they had not been read. In
acknowledging this act of attention, Lady Mary wrote that she could
almost regret that he had not glanced his eye over a correspondence
which might have shown him what so young a man might perhaps be inclined
to doubt--'the possibility of a long and steady friendship subsisting
between two persons of different sexes without the least mixture of
love.'

Nevertheless some expressions of Lord Hervey's seem to have bordered on
the tender style, when writing to Lady Mary in such terms as these. She
had complained that she was too old to inspire a passion (a sort of
challenge for a compliment), on which he wrote: 'I should think anybody
a great fool that said he liked spring better than summer, merely
because it is further from autumn, or that they loved green fruit better
than ripe only because it was further from being rotten. I ever did, and
believe ever shall, like woman best--

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

Certainly this looks very unlike a pure Platonic, and it is not to be
wondered at that Lady Hervey refused to call on Lady Mary, when, long
after Lord Hervey's death, that fascinating woman returned to England. A
wit, a courtier at the very fount of all politeness, Lo