ness or disappointments, good nature Conti's charming seat at L'Isle Adam, can be altered by neither: one would choose the one in a companion, the other in a friend. I judge good nature to be the effect of tenderness, and good temper to be the consequence of ease and cheerfulness: the first exerts itself in acts of compassion and beneficence, the other shows itself in equality of humor and compliance." In "Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Son" a long paragraph is devoted to Lady Hervey, to whom he gives young. Stanhope an introduction. The date of the letter is October 22, 1750, at which time she was in Paris, where, indeed, she seems to have resided until the close of the following year. His lordship's admiration of his old friend is unbounded. "She has been bred all her life at courts," he says, "of which she has acquired all the easy goodbreeding, and politeness, without the frivolousness. She has all the reading that a woman should have; and more than any woman need have; for she understands Latin perfectly well, though she wisely conceals it." [Lord Chesterfield had obviously not seen her correspondence with Mr. Morris, where it is rather en évidence.] "No woman,' (he goes on) "ever had more than she has, le ton de la parfaitement bonne campagnie, les maniéres engageantes, et le je ne scais quoi qui plait," and he bids his awkward offspring consult her in everything pertaining to good man ners. " "In such a case she will not put you out of countenance, by telling you of it in company; but either intimate it by some sign, or wait for an opportunity when you are alone together." She will not only introduce him, says his lordship, but ("if one may use so low a word") she will puff him, as she lives in the beau monde. Of this, unhappily, her letters to Mr. Morris of Nutshalling afford no traces. But she was evidently acquainted with many of the personages who figure in Walpole's later letters from the French capital. Her chief friend was Mademoiselle de Charolais, a princess of the blood, with whom she lived much, and she went frequently to the Prince de An in the valley of Montmorenci. other intimate was that Duchess d'Aiguillon whose singular fancy led her to translate and recite the "Eloisa to Abelard" of Pope and the "Solomon" of Prior. In the summer of 1751 Lady Hervey was ill, and, like Walpole, testifies to the extreme kindness and solicitude of her French friends, who overpowered her with delicate attentions in the shape of light quilts, couches, easy-chairs, "little chickens out of the country,” and “new-laid eggs warm from the hen," all of which things naturally heighten her "reluctance to quit this delightful place [Paris], and most agreeable people." But the only approach to a portrait which she draws for her correspondent is the following pen-sketch of the now venerable Cydias of La Bruyère-the author of the "Pluralité des Mondes." "I dine sometimes" (she says) “with a set of beaux esprits, among which old Fontenelle presides. He has no mark of age but wrinkles, and a degree of deafness; but when, by sitting near him, you make him hear you, he never fails to understand you, and always answers with that liveliness, and a sort of prettiness, peculiar to himself. often repeats and applies his own and other people's poetry very agreeably; but only occasionally, as it is proper and applicable to the subject. He has still a great deal of gallantry in his turn and in his discourse. He is ninety-two, and has the cheerfulness, liveliness and even the taste and appetite of twenty-two." He was two years older than Lady Hervey thought; but he had still six years to live before, in January, 1757, he experienced that final difficulté d'être to which his death-bed words referred. He As far as one can judge from the dates of Lady Hervey's letters, it must have been during her absence in Paris at this period that she lost her fatherin-law, who departed this world on January 20, 1751, in his eighty-sixth year. His last communication to her is filled with paternal concern lest her then recent indisposition should have been promoted by the late hours and good cookery of Paris; and, from the one that immediately preceded it, it seems that forebodings of her impending departure had for the time been distracting him from the misfortunes of his country, since he refers France as "a corrival" which "hath now prov'd to have had that superior ascendant long apprehended by, Madam, your Ladyship's disconsolate, faithfull friend and servant, Bristol." Some years previous to his death, and partly in anticipation of the severance from her Suffolk home which that event would involve, Lady Hervey had been rebuilding her London house in St. James's Place, her architect being Henry Flitcroft, the "Burlington Harry" to whom we owe Hampstead Church and St. Giles's-in-the-Fields. Her letters contain frequent references to the progress of this enterprise, and to the prolonged familiarity with compasses, rulers, Greystock bricks, cornices, fascias, copings, and so forth, which her minute supervision of the subject entailed. Besides making it comfortable, her object was to render it as countrified as possible, so as to compensate her, as far as might be, for the loss of the bird-haunted lawns and leafy shrubberies of Ickworth; and as its five windows in a row looked uninterruptedly over the Green Park towards Chelsea (not far from the spot where in 1730 her husband had fought his duel with Pulteney), her desire in this respect was doubtless gratified. The house, which stood between Spencer House and that of Sir John Cope (of Preston Pans), is still in existence, though at a later period it was divided into two. At St. James's Place Lady Hervey resided when she was in town, and here she entertained her particular friends with delightful little dinners, cooked and served à la Française, where the guests would be wits like Walpole or Chesterfield, and philosophers like Hume (who sends her from Edinburgh his account of his quarrel with Rousseau), or M. Helvetius from Paris, whose treatise, "De l'Esprit," is, with Voltaire "Sur la Tolérance," VOL. XII. 579 LIVING AGE. among the latest literary novelties which her ladyship reports to Mr. Morris. Lord March, afterwards "Old Q," who was also a favorite visitor at the Hôtel de Milady, as he calls it, writes enthusiastically to Selwyn of these charming gatherings. Another of the habitués was Pulteney, both before and after the period when, in Lord Chesterfield's phrase, he "shrunk into insignificancy and an earldom." A passage or two from Lady Hervey's letters at the period of his death in July, 1764, serve to complete and confirm Lord Chesterfield's by no means flattering portrait of their common friend, whose brilliant social gifts seem never to have blinded even his chosen associates to his essentially selfish and sordid character: "He was a most agreeable companion, and a very goodhumored man; but I, that have known him above forty years, knew that he never thought of any one when he did not see them, nor ever cared a great deal for those he did see." "He has left an immense fortune to a brother he never cared for, and always, with reason, despised, and a great deal to a man he once liked, but had lately great reason to think ill of. sorry he is dead; he was agreeable and entertaining; and whenever I was well enough to go down-stairs, and give him a good dinner, he was always ready to come and give me his good company in return. I was satisfied with that; one must take people as they are." I am Lord Bath died at eighty-two, and when this letter was written Lady Hervey was sixty-four. She returned to France several times after her first visit, and made excursions into Scotland and its "frightfully dirty" capital. But in later years, as hereditary gout grew upon her, her travels became restricted to such distances as would enable a postchaise to bring her home at the first approach of an attack. Her letters to Mr. Morris, whose friend and benefactor she continued to the last, extend to a little before her death, but she doubtless wrote many others to her favorite daughter Lepel; to her eldest son, the ambassador; and to his brother, the Augustus Hervey who afterwards became an admiral, which, we suspect, must have been even better reading than many of those to her clerical correspondent. To Mr. Morris, of necessity, she shows only the more serious side of her character, although even her communications to him are sufficient to reveal her as a woman of great intellectual capacity, of very superior ability, and of a happy and cheerful habít of mind. To those she loved she was uniformly affectionate and sympathetic, and it is not difficult to believe her assertion that she never lost a friend except by death. She herself died in September, 1768. Walpole, who dedicated to her the first three volumes of his "Anecdotes of Painting," and to whom she left a small remembrance in her will, thus writes her epltaph to Mann: "She is a great loss to several persons; her house was one of the most agreeable in London; and her own friendliness, good breeding, and amiable temper had attached all that knew her. Her sufferings with the gout and rheumatism were terrible, and yet never could affect her patience or divert her attention to her friends.” There was a miniature of her at Strawberry Hill: but her best likeness in middle life is a portrait by Allan Ramsay, which also belonged to Walpole, and which Lady Hervey probably gave him in return for his own portrait by the same artist. This latter picture of her, as a pleasant-faced elderly lady, is now in the possession of Viscount Lifford, at Broadway, in Worcestershire. our boyhood, and are still the solace and recreation of our middle age. Though we readily admit the truth in matters mundane of the old proverb, "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,"-that sort of knowledge, we mean, which tempts the parson and perhaps the schoolmaster to dabble in stocks and shares, and our women folk to practise homoeopathy and allopathy alternately on their unsuspecting children and other stray patients,-we have shown that there were in bygone days occasions of dire peril when a little timely knowledge of the phraseology of Walter Scott not only stood us in good stead, but saved the skins of a dozen other trembling urchins. In those early days we reaped no small amount of satisfaction from the reflection that the author whose companionship we so dearly enjoyed met with kindly recognition from the power that ruled our destiny, and even had it in our mind that if we were detected in the act of studying "Ivanhoe" when we ought to have been grappling with our Homeric Lexicon, we should try the experiment of appealing unto Cæsar, and plead that the warden himself admitted the existence of a remarkable affinity between the Waverley Novels and the "Iliad." In view of the dire penalties that were attached to novel-reading in school-hours, it was probably as well for us that we were never caught in flagrante delicto; but perhaps the consciousness that we were pursuing knowledge under dangers as well as difficulties rendered the pursuit more entrancing at the time, and gave us a more lasting affection for Walter Scott, as being, so to speak, our accomplice in iniquity. But at the same time we were tempted to listen more attentively than our classmates, most of whom knew about as much of Scott's novels and poems as they did of the Koran, to the parallels drawn by our instructor between the "Iliad" and the Waverley Novels, and we have a distinct recollection of being told on one occasion that we had saved the honor-so he called it, though it really was the seat of honor -of the class by being able to repeat one week the ipsissima verba that he had uttered in the preceding lesson. Fair things were prophesied of our future, and a dole of small coins rewarded us at the moment; but, lest we should be unduly exalted by present success, the donation was accompanied by an ominous warning for the future: "But I'll flog 'ee soundly, my boy, if I hear of 'ee talking in the dormitory." We did not at the time see the exact connection between the two ideas, and we still regard it as a mere freak of erratic genius not uncommon in our revered preceptor; but possibly it occurred to him that, like most other boys, we should be all the better for an occasional flogging, or possibly it repented him that we had spoilt sport, and that retributive justice had by a very trivial incident been deprived of sundry legitimate victims. The money was soon spent and the warning forgotten; but we still feel that we owe a debt of gratitude to the highly gifted, though, alas! not very worldly wise man who first instilled into our mind the idea that the Greek bard-for we absolutely decline to doubt the individuality of Homerand the Wizard of the North should be studied side by side. With boys at any rate the most popular of Scott's novels are the tales of the Crusaders. The Trojan war was the earliest crusade, or at least the counter part of a crusade, and the first gathering of a European force to attack the shores of Asia. If in examining the immediate cause of the Crusades we do not at once make it our business to look for the woman, it is certain that the sin of mother Eve when she ate the "apple of Discord" in the garden of Eden was the ultimate cause not only of the Crusades, but of every war that has been waged since the world began. Nor, on the other hand, need we suppose that the recovery of that very fickle, if very beautiful, young woman Helen was the one and only object of the Greek expedition to Troy. The national honor of Greece had been attacked; an insolent Oriental adventurer had carried off a Greek lady; the sacred rites of hospitality had been violated, the majesty of Zeus Xenios outraged. Nestor of Pylos and one Palamedes, like Peter the Hermit in later days, preach a Jehad or sacred war, and each Greek hero is summoned to take up arms and join in avenging the national disgrace, on pain of being held "nidering or mansworn." Here and again some chieftain, either gifted with rather more common sense than his neighbors, or perhaps actuated by the same self-seeking spirit that kept men like our own William Rufus or John of Anjou at home while their elder brothers went to the wars, casts about for an excuse for evading the summons. But exceptions are few and far between, and public feeling is well-nigh as unanimous as that of the assemblage at Clermont; the young bloods of Greece are burning to wet their spears, and older men whose days of romance should be over are carried away by the general wave of enthusiasm; the hunt is up, the game is afoot, and the Trojan ravisher must be tracked to his lair. Again, the attack on Torquilstone, though on a smaller scale, reminds us of the siege of Troy. True that the one drags on for a weary ten years, and the other is begun and ended in the short space of a summer day. Still many of the prominent features are present in each case. The honor of a noble lady is in peril—the Saxon Princess Rowena, the Queen of Beauty, hardly less fair, so the novelist portrays her, than the Greek Helen, has been abducted by a licentious foreigner; as the Greeks without Achilles, so the avenging outlaws without the Black Knight's "good heart and mighty arm" will fail altogether in their enterprise. Cedric and Locksley, Diomed and Ajax, are lusty and valiant auxiliaries but it is the death of Front de Boeuf at the hands of the Black Knight that seals the fate of Torquilstone, just as the death of Hector involves the fall of Troy. There is the same talk of compromise, the same offer to raise the siege if matters are restored to the status quo ante, the same corresponding suggestion of a partial restitution. Ulrica, the paramour of Front de Bœuf, plays the part of double traitress within the walls of Torquilstone, as Helen the paramour of Paris had proved herself double traitress in the citadel of Troy. Nor, finally, can it be pretended that the Greeks who at tacked Troy, though they were, like Locksley's merry men, in the right on the one particular occasion, were habitually much more honest than were the majority of the assailants of Torquilstone. To go more into detail, the Black Knight, like Achilles, combined the accomplishments of the minstrel with the prowess of the warrior; and the Myrmidons whom the son of Thetis led to Troy, followers "fierce as ravening wolves," yet men to whom their leader's word is law, resemble in essential points the Free Companions of De Bracy. The picture of Thetis rising on the sea, "like as it were a mist," is held to have suggested the White Lady of Avenel; Norna of the Fitful Head at one moment recalls the image of Cassandra, at another tempts us to suppose that she was a latter-day priestess of Apollo. Arthur de Vere, in "Anne of Geierstein," not only bends the bow-not indeed of Ulysses, but of some bygone English Paladin-but even shoots at the same mark as the Greek archers shot at in the games before Troy, and reproduces the feats of Teucer and Meriones. As Valor and Subtlety, represented by Diomed and Ulysses, successfully accomplish their perilous journey into the heart of the Trojan camp, so Valor and Folly-a Folly, be it remarked, so closely akin to Subtlety that we really have to take Wamba's own word for it that he was a fool rather than a very clever fellow-accomplish a journey well-nigh as perilous through the recesses of a forest beset by enemies. The Greek man-at-arms, as compared with the chieftain, is so insignificant an individual that neither Homer nor any of his heroes seems to recognize his existence; so Brian de Bois-Guilbert mentions incidentally that he has slain with his own hand no less than three hundred Saracens; and the wandering Richard professes that he will call for no aid against a score of rascaille "whom one good knight would drive before him as the wind drives the withered leaves." The position held by Agamemnon as generalissimo of the Achæan host is analogous to that occupied by Godfrey de Bouillon in the first crusade, if perhaps more clearly defined than that of Richard in the "Talisman," where the latter, only "from respect to his high renown and great feats of arms," is allowed to assume a "precedence which, elsewhere and upon other motives, would not have been yielded." For chiefs like Diomed and Ajax owe no allegiance to the King of Men apart from the obedience due to the recognized head of a joint expedition. All important matters are referred by Agamemnon to the Council of Chiefs, much in the same way as the titular leaders of the Crusades take no final step without the authority of the "Princes of the Holy Crusade." Or, again, we may compare the relations existing between Agamemnon and the other Greek heroes with those of a Plantagenet king and his great barons. Agamemnon himself is in many ways extremely like a Plantagenet, more particularly a Plantagenet of the type of Richard I., or-to go further afieldthe fourth Edward as we see him in "The Last of the Barons." There is the same commanding presence, the same imperious and capricious temper, the same fatal tendency to mar the consummation of cherished schemes by hasty and ill-considered action, to postpone the common wear to personal gratification, and to allow the passions of the man to sully the dignity of the king. Like Richard, Agamemnon on at least one critical occasion allows insensate rage, or an overweening sense of the royal prerogative, to blind his better judgment; like Edward of York, he "aredes well in the hour of adversity" the powerful chief whose assistance he has affected to despise. Is it heresy to say that, like Edward of York, the King of Men is a sorry type of conjugal fidelity? Putting his doubtful relations with Cassandra out of the question, we can find some excuse for Clytemnestra |