Lord Cornbury was an amiable young man, given to hospitality and letter-writing, and panegyrised by Pope in such tributes as his pretended scorn for nobility did not prevent him from paying to his entertainers:—
"Would you be blest, despise low joys, low gains,
Disdain whatever Cornbury disdains;
Be virtuous, and be happy, for your pains."
Such are the honours and the advice of poetry; but it may be suggested that a British peer has little temptation to low joys or low gains, and that it is not difficult to bear the trials of life in possession of every advantage which life can give. The pungent pen of Lady Wortley Montague gives an easier account of this dilettante lord on his death. "He had certainly a very good heart: I have often thought it a great pity it was not under the direction of a better head. His desire of fixing his name to a certain quantity of wall, is one instance, among thousands, of the passion men have for perpetuating their memory"—(possibly an allusion, sufficiently contemptuous, to his having built at Cornbury Park in Oxfordshire.)
We next have a letter from the first Lord Lyttleton, on the subject of a tour which the minister was still making, recommending that he should not risk his final recovery by coming to the House of Commons,—"Not that, if you were present, either you or I could do any good."
Lord Hervey, in his Memoirs of the Reign of George II., gives a sketch of Lyttleton, such as a modern fop might give of a successful rival, closing with—"He had a great flow of words, that were always uttered in a lulling monotony; and the little meaning they had to boast of was generally borrowed from the commonplace maxims and sentiments of moralists, philosophers, patriots, and poets, crudely imbibed, half-digested, ill put together, and confusedly refunded."
Such was the caricature of the Lyttleton with whose poems all the ladies of England were enamoured, and who won all the plaudits of the clergy by his "Tract on the Conversion of St Paul;" certainly a very clever performance, and an extraordinary one, as coming from a man living in the fashionable circles of the last century.
Then follows a letter from the celebrated Lord Mansfield on the same subject:—
"I am very impatient for your recovery, and I rejoice in the favourable accounts I hear. I rambled about, as usual, during the leisure hours I had; and, among other places I was at, I spent three days most agreeably at Hagley with our friends Lyttleton and Pitt; where, you may believe, you was—[sic, in orig.]—not forgot.... Pope is at Bath, perched upon his hill, making epigrams, and stifling them in their birth; and Lord H., [Hervey]—would you believe it!—is writing libels on the king and his ministers."
Lord Hervey was the son of the first Earl of Bristol—was the most inveterate courtier of his time, and in remarkable confidence with the whole of the royal family. Unfortunately, he knew too much, and has bequeathed his knowledge to posterity in a Memoir, fatal to the moral character of his age, yet lively, epigrammatic, and anecdotical. The whole family, even to the close of the century, were eccentric. The keen and witty Lady Wortley Montague defined them as a third class of the human race—"men, women, and Herveys."
Those were curious times. The letter ends with the news that Lord Bradford's mistress, to whom he had left his estate, had bequeathed it to Pulteney, Earl of Bath. Thus that most parsimonious of all peers got £12,000 a-year!