'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, Lord Hervey wanted
the genuine source of all social qualities--Christianity. That moral
refrigerator which checks the kindly current of neighbourly kindness,
and which prevents all genial feeling from expanding, produced its usual
effect--misanthropy. Lord Hervey's lines, in his 'Satire after the
manner of Persius,' describe too well his own mental canker:--
'Mankind I know, their motives and their art,
Their vice their own, their virtue best apart,
Till played so oft, that all the cheat can tell,
And dangerous only when 'tis acted well.'
Lord Hervey left in the possession of his family a manuscript work,
consisting of memoirs of his own time, written in his own autograph,
which was clean and legible. This work, which has furnished many of the
anecdotes connected with his court life in the foregoing pages, was long
guarded from the eye of any but the Hervey family, owing to an
injunction given in his will by Augustus, third Earl of Bristol, Lord
Hervey's son, that it should not see the light until after the death of
his Majesty George III. It was not therefore published until 1848, when
they were edited by Mr. Croker. They are referred to both by Horace
Walpole, who had heard of them, if he had not seen them, and by Lord
Hailes, as affording the most intimate portraiture of a court that has
ever been presented to the English people. Such a delineation as Lord
Hervey has left ought to cause a sentiment of thankfulness in every
British heart for not being exposed to such influences, to such examples
as he gives, in the present day, when goodness, affection, purity,
benevolence, are the household deities of the court of our beloved,
inestimable Queen Victoria.