Like Lady Hervey, she lived with her husband on well-bred terms:  there existed no quarrel between them; no avowed ground of coldness; it was the icy boundary of frozen feeling that severed them; the sure and lasting though polite destroyer of all bonds, indifference.  Lady Mary was full of repartee, of poetry, of anecdote, and was not averse to admiration; but she was essentially a woman of common sense, of views enlarged by travel, and of ostensibly good principles.  A woman of delicacy was not to be found in those days, any more than other productions of the nineteenth century:  a telegraphic message would have been almost as startling to a courtly ear as the refusal of a fine lady to suffer a double entendre.  Lady Mary was above all scruples, and Lord Hervey, who had lived too long with George II. and his queen to have the moral sense in her perfection, liked her all the better for her courage—­her merry, indelicate jokes, and her putting things down by their right names, on which Lady Mary plumed herself:  she was what they term in the north of England, ‘Emancipated.’  They formed an old acquaintance with a confidential, if not a tender friendship; and that their intimacy was unpleasant to Lady Hervey was proved by her refusal—­when, after the grave had closed over Lord Hervey, late in life, Lady Mary ill, and broken down by age, returned to die in England—­to resume an acquaintance which had been a painful one to her.

Lord Hervey was a martyr to illness of an epileptic character; and Lady Mary gave him her sympathy.  She was somewhat of a doctor—­and being older than her friend, may have had the art of soothing sufferings, which were the worse because they were concealed.  Whilst he writhed in pain, he was obliged to give vent to his agony by alleging that an attack of cramp bent him double:  yet he lived by rule—­a rule harder to adhere to than that of the most conscientious homoeopath in the present day.  In the midst of court gaieties and the duties of office, he thus wrote to Dr. Cheyne:—­

...  ’To let you know that I continue one of your most pious votaries, and to tell you the method I am in.  In the first place, I never take wine nor malt drink, nor any liquid but water and milk-tea; in the next, I eat no meat but the whitest, youngest, and tenderest, nine times in ten nothing but chicken, and never more than the quantity of a small one at a meal.  I seldom eat any supper, but if any, nothing absolutely but bread and water; two days in the week I eat no flesh; my breakfast is dry biscuit, not sweet, and green tea; I have left off butter as bilious; I eat no salt, nor any sauce but bread-sauce.’

Among the most cherished relaxations of the royal household were visits to Twickenham, whilst the court was at Richmond.  The River Thames, which has borne on its waves so much misery in olden times—­which was the highway from the Star-chamber to the tower—­which has been belaboured in our days with so much wealth, and sullied with so much impurity; that river, whose current is one hour rich as the stream of a gold river, the next hour, foul as the pestilent churchyard,—­was then, especially between Richmond and Teddington, a glassy, placid stream, reflecting on its margin the chestnut-trees of stately Ham, and the reeds and wild flowers which grew undisturbed in the fertile meadows of Petersham.