they must simper an hour and catch cold in the Princess's apartment; from thence (as Shakespeare has it) to dinner, with what appetite they may;—and after that, till midnight, walk, work, or think, which they please. I can easily believe no lone house in Wales, with a mountain and a rookery, is more contemplative than this Court; and as a proof of it I need only tell you Miss L. walked with me three or four hours by moonlight, and we met no creature of any quality but the King, who gave audience to the Vice-Chamberlain, all alone under the garden wall."
Mr. Alexander Pope was very proud of his neat phrases, for he must needs repeat them next year in a letter to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
III
From Pope to Lord Hervey is an easy step. The poet was a good hater, a bitter little man, as warped in mind as in body, with a talent for artificial pathos no doubt on occasion, and even some real tears now and then, but at bottom a cold-hearted fellow and a bitter. Lord Hervey was much that Pope could not be, and yet had enough of qualities like his own to make him doubly obnoxious. He was strikingly handsome, a man of birth and fashion, a successful gallant, unscrupulous in "affairs of the heart," of low morals and with a large spice of aris-
