, and
tired all the world with his passion. At length both recovered, and the
lady had all the enjoyments which she could find in ambition. Carteret
obtained an earldom, lost his place, but became only more popular,
personally distinguished, and politically active. The Countess then
became the female head of the Opposition, and gave brilliant parties, to
the infinite annoyance of the Pelhams. For a while, she was the
"observed of all observers." But her career came to a sudden and
melancholy close. She had given promise of an heir, which would have
been doubly a source of gratification to her husband; as his son by a
former wife was a lunatic. But she was suddenly seized with a fever. One
evening, as her mother and sister were sitting beside her, she sighed
and said, "I feel death coming very fast upon me." This was their first
intimation of her danger. She died on the same night!

Walpole is the especial chronicler of this time. Such a man must have
been an intolerable nuisance in his day, but his piquant impertinence is
amusing in ours. He was evidently a wasp, pretending to perform the part
of a butterfly, and fluttering over all the court flowers, only to plant
his sting. As he was a perpetual flirt, he dangled round the Pomfret
family; and probably received some severe rebuke from their mother, for
he describes her with all the venom of an expelled _dilettante_.

He speaks of her as all that was prim in pedantry, and all that was
ridiculous in affectation; as, on being told of some man who talked of
nothing but Madeira, gravely asking, "What language that was;" and as
attending the public act at Oxford (on the occasion of her presenting
some statues to the University) in a box built for her near the
Vice-Chancellor, "where she sat for three days together, to receive
adoration, and hear herself for four hours at a time called Minerva." In
this assembly, adds the wit, in his peculiar style, "she appeared in all
the tawdry poverty and frippery imaginable, and in a scoured damask
robe," and wonders that "she did not wash out a few words of Latin," as
she used to _fricassee_ French and Italian; or, that "she did not
torture some learned simile," as when she said, that "it was as
difficult to get into an Italian coach, as it was for Caesar to take
Attica, by which she meant Utica."

But Lady Pomfret is said also to have employed her talents upon more
substantial things than pedantry. She had an early intercourse with t