and pocket; with cut steel buttons that glistened beneath the courtly wax-lights:  with these and fifty other small but costly characteristics that established the reputation of an aspirant Maccaroni.  Lord Hervey was, in truth, an effeminate creature:  too dainty to walk; too precious to commit his frame to horseback; and prone to imitate the somewhat recluse habits which German rulers introduced within the court:  he was disposed to candle-light pleasures and cockney diversions; to Marybone and the Mall, and shrinking from the athletic and social recreations which, like so much that was manly and English, were confined almost to the English squire pur et simple after the Hanoverian accession; when so much degeneracy for a while obscured the English character, debased its tone, enervated its best races, vilified its literature, corrupted its morals, changed its costume, and degraded its architecture.

Beneath the effeminacy of the Maccaroni, Lord Hervey was one of the few who united to intense finery in every minute detail, an acute and cultivated intellect.  To perfect a Maccaroni it was in truth advisable, if not essential, to unite some smattering of learning, a pretension to wit, to his super-dandyism; to be the author of some personal squib, or the translator of some classic.  Queen Caroline was too cultivated herself to suffer fools about her, and Lord Hervey was a man after her own taste; as a courtier he was essentially a fine gentleman; and, more than that, he could be the most delightful companion, the most sensible adviser, and the most winning friend in the court.  His ill-health, which he carefully concealed, his fastidiousness, his ultra-delicacy of habits, formed an agreeable contrast to the coarse robustness of ’Sir Robert,’ and constituted a relief after the society of the vulgar, strong-minded minister, who was born for the hustings and the House of Commons rather than for the courtly drawing-room.

John Lord Hervey, long vice-chamberlain to Queen Caroline, was, like Sir Robert Walpole, descended from a commoner’s family, one of those good old squires who lived, as Sir Henry Wotton says, ’without lustre and without obscurity.’  The Duchess of Marlborough had procured the elevation of the Herveys of Ickworth to the peerage.  She happened to be intimate with Sir Thomas Felton, the father of Mrs. Hervey, afterwards Lady Bristol, whose husband, at first created Lord Hervey, and afterwards Earl of Bristol, expressed his obligations by retaining as his motto, when raised to the peerage, the words ’Je n’oublieray jamais,’ in allusion to the service done him by the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough.