[Illustration:  POPE AT HIS VILLA—­DISTINGUISHED VISITORS.]

Then the conversation!  How gladly would we catch here some drops of what must have been the very essence of small-talk, and small-talk is the only thing fit for early dinners!  Our host is noted for his easy address, his engaging manners, his delicacy, politeness, and a certain tact he had of showing every guest that he was welcome in the choicest expressions and most elegant terms.  Then Lady Mary! how brilliant is her slightest turn! how she banters Pope—­how she gives double entendre for double entendre to Hervey!  How sensible, yet how gay is all she says; how bright, how cutting, yet how polished is the equivoque of the witty, high-bred Hervey!  He is happy that day—­away from the coarse, passionate king, whom he hated with a hatred that burns itself out in his lordship’s ‘Memoirs;’ away from the somewhat exacting and pitiable queen; away from the hated Pelham, and the rival Grafton.

And conversation never flags when all, more or less, are congenial; when all are well-informed, well-bred and resolved to please.  Yet there is a canker in that whole assembly; that canker is a want of confidence; no one trusts the other; Lady Mary’s encouragement of Hervey surprises and shocks the Princess Caroline, who loves him secretly; Hervey’s attentions to the queen of letters scandalizes Pope, who soon afterwards makes a declaration to Lady Mary.  Pope writhes under a lash just held over him by Lady Mary’s hand.  Hervey feels that the poet, though all suavity, is ready to demolish him at any moment, if he can; and the only really happy and complacent person of the whole party is, perhaps, Pope’s old mother, who sits in the room next to that occupied for dinner, industriously spinning.

This happy state of things came, however, as is often the case, in close intimacies, to a painful conclusion.  There was too little reality, too little earnestness of feeling, for the friendship between Pope and Lady Mary, including Lord Hervey, to last long.  His lordship had his affectations, and his effeminate nicety was proverbial.  One day being asked at dinner if he would take some beef, he is reported to have answered, ’Beef? oh no! faugh! don’t you know I never eat beef, nor horse, nor curry, nor any of those things?’ Poor man! it was probably a pleasant way of turning off what he may have deemed an assault on a digestion that could hardly conquer any solid food.  This affectation offended Lady Mary, whose mot, that there were three species, ’Men, women, and Herveys’—­implies a perfect perception of the eccentricities even of her gifted friend, Lord Hervey, whose mother’s friend she had been, and the object of whose admiration she undoubtedly was.