en his father was at Newmarket, Jack Hervey, as he was called,
was to ride a race, to please his father; but his mother could not risk
her dear boy's safety, and the race was won by a jockey. He was as
precious and as fragile as porcelain: the elder brother's death made the
heir of the Herveys more valuable, more effeminate, and more controlled
than ever by his eccentric mother. A court was to be his hemisphere, and
to that all his views, early in life, tended. He went to Hanover to pay
his court to George I.: Carr had done the same, and had come back
enchanted with George, the heir-presumptive, who made him one of the
lords of the bedchamber. Jack Hervey also returned full of enthusiasm
for the Prince of Wales, afterwards George II., and the Princess; and
that visit influenced his destiny.

He now proposed making the grand tour, which comprised Paris, Germany,
and Italy. But his mother again interfered: she wept, she exhorted, she
prevailed. Means were refused, and the stripling was recalled to hang
about the court, or to loiter at Ickworth, scribbling verses, and
causing his father uneasiness lest he should be too much of a poet, and
too little of a public man.

Such was his youth: disappointed by not obtaining a commission in the
Guards, he led a desultory butterfly-like life; one day at Richmond with
Queen Caroline, then Princess of Wales; another, at Pope's villa, at
Twickenham; sometimes in the House of Commons, in which he succeeded his
elder brother as member for Bury; and, at the period when he has been
described as forming one of the quartett in Queen Caroline's closet at
St. James's, as vice-chamberlain to his partial and royal patroness.

His early marriage with Mary Lepel, the beautiful maid of honour to
Queen Caroline, insured his felicity, though it did not curb his
predilections for other ladies.

Henceforth Lord Hervey lived all the year round in what were then called
lodgings, that is, apartments appropriated to the royal household, or
even to others, in St. James's, or at Richmond, or at Windsor. In order
fully to comprehend all the intimate relations which he had with the
court, it is necessary to present the reader with some account of the
family of George II. Five daughters had been the female issue of his
majesty's marriage with Queen Caroline. Three of these princesses, the
three elder ones, had lived, during the life of George I., at St.
James's with their grandfather; who, irritated by the d