The Herveys had always been an eccentric race; and the classification of ‘men, women, and Herveys,’ by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, was not more witty than true.  There was in the whole race an eccentricity which bordered on the ridiculous, but did not imply want of sense or of talent.  Indeed this third species, ‘the Herveys,’ were more gifted than the generality of ‘men and women.’  The father of Lord Hervey had been a country gentleman of good fortune, living at Ickworth, near Bury in Suffolk, and representing the town in parliament, as his father had before him, until raised to the peerage.  Before that elevation he had lived on in his own county, uniting the character of the English squire, in that fox-hunting county, with that of a perfect gentleman, a scholar, and a most admirable member of society.  He was a poet, also, affecting the style of Cowley, who wrote an elegy upon his uncle, William Hervey, an elegy compared to Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ in imagery, music, and tenderness of thought.  The shade of Cowley, whom Charles II. pronounced, at his death, to be ‘the best man in England,’ haunted this peer, the first Earl of Bristol.  He aspired especially to the poet’s wit; and the ambition to be a wit flew like wildfire among his family, especially infecting his two sons, Carr, the elder brother of the subject of this memoir, and Lord Hervey.

It would have been well could the Earl of Bristol have transmitted to his sons his other qualities.  He was pious, moral, affectionate, sincere; a consistent Whig of the old school, and, as such, disapproving of Sir Robert Walpole, of the standing army, the corruptions, and that doctrine of expediency so unblushingly avowed by the ministers.

Created Earl of Bristol in 1714, the heir-apparent to his titles and estates was the elder brother, by a former marriage, of John, Lord Hervey; the dissolute, clever, whimsical Carr, Lord Hervey.  Pope, in one of his satirical appeals to the second Lord Hervey, speaks of his friendship with Carr, ‘whose early death deprived the family’ (of Hervey) ’of as much wit and honour as he left behind him in any part of it.’  The wit was a family attribute, but the honour was dubious:  Carr was as deistical as any Maccaroni of the day, and, perhaps, more dissolute than most:  in one respect he has left behind him a celebrity which may be as questionable as his wit, or his honour; he is reputed to be the father of Horace Walpole, and if we accept presumptive evidence of the fact, the statement is clearly borne out, for in his wit, his indifference to religion, to say the least, his satirical turn, his love of the world, and his contempt of all that was great and good, he strongly resembles his reputed son; whilst the levity of Lady Walpole’s character, and Sir Robert’s laxity and dissoluteness, do not furnish any reasonable doubt to the statement made by Lady Louisa Stuart, in the introduction to Lord Wharncliffe’s ‘Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.’  Carr, Lord Hervey, died early, and his half-brother succeeded him in his title and expectations.