Lord Hervey’s portrait of the celebrated Chesterfield is a work of elaborate peevishness. It has all the marks of an angry rival, and all the caricature of a pen dipped in personal mortification. He allows him wit, but with an utter “mismanagement in its use;” talent without common-sense, and a ridiculous propensity to love-making, with an ungainly face and a repulsive figure. This character is new to those who have been so long accustomed to regard Chesterfield even on the more unfavourable side of his character. To his admirers the portrait is of course intolerable; but we must leave some future biographer to settle those matters with the ghost of his libeller.
An anecdote is given illustrative of the violence of Lord Townshend’s temper, and the cutting calmness of Walpole’s. Townshend was a man of considerable powers, but singularly irritable. He had been from an early period engaged in office, and was a constant debater in the House. His temper, however, made him so publicly disliked, and his selfishness so much alienated public men, that when he left office he did not leave a regret behind. He was followed only by epigrams, of which one is given—
“With such a head, and such a heart,
If fortune fails to take thy part,
And long continues thus unkind,
She must be deaf as well as blind,
And, quite reversing every rule,
Nor see the knave, nor hear the fool.”
Lord Townshend had been Foreign Secretary, and Walpole had to defend his blunders in the Commons. This made the latter anxious, and the former jealous. Another source of discontent was added, probably with still greater effect. Walpole, who had begun as a subordinate to Townshend, had risen above him. He had begun poor, and now exceeded him in fortune; and, as the last offence, he had built Houghton, a much handsomer mansion than Lord Townshend’s house at Raynham, which his lordship had once considered as the boast of Norfolk. Thus both were in a condition for perpetual squabble. The anecdote to which we have alluded was this:—One evening, at Windsor, on the Queen’s asking Walpole and Townshend where they had dined that day, the latter said that he had dined at home with Lord and Lady Trevor; on which Walpole said to her Majesty, smiling, “My lord, Madam, I think, is grown coquet from a long widowhood, and has some design upon my Lady Trevor; for his assiduity of late, in that family, is grown so much beyond common civility, that without this solution I know not how to account for it.” The burlesque of this not very decorous observation was obvious, for Lady Trevor was nearly seventy years old, and, besides being a woman of character, was of the “most forbidding countenance that natural ugliness, age, and small-pox, ever compounded.”
But Townshend, affecting to take the remark literally, replied with great warmth—“No, sir, I am not one of those fine gentlemen who find no time of life, nor any station in the world, preservatives against follies and immoralities that are hardly excusable when youth and idleness make us most liable,” &c., &c. In short, his lordship made a speech in which his voice trembled, and every limb shook with passion. But Walpole, always master of his temper, made him no other answer than asking him with a smile, and in a very mild tone of voice, “What, my lord, all this for Lady Trevor!”