Page:Hutton, William Holden - Hampton Court (1897).djvu/302

214 Court preserves Belinda, the Baron, and Sir Plume; and Pope's immortality is safe in its keeping.

What served the most polished of poets for the setting of his true (but not too true) story served him also for subject when he wrote some of the pleasantest of his very artificial letters. "I went by water," he wrote in 1717, "to Hampton Court, unattended by all but my own virtues, which were not of so modest a nature as to keep themselves or me concealed; or met the Prince, with all his ladies, on horseback, coming from hunting. Mrs. B. and Mrs. L. took me into protection, contrary to the laws against harbouring papists, and gave me a dinner, with something I liked better, an opportunity of conversing with Mrs. H. We all agreed that the life of a Maid of Honour was of all things the most miserable, and wished that every woman who envied it had a specimen of it. To eat Westphalia ham in morning, ride over hedges and ditches on borrowed hacks, come home in the heat of the day with a fever, and (what is worse an hundred times) with a red mark on the forehead from an uneasy hat—all this may qualify them to make them excellent wives for foxhunters, and bear abundance of ruddy-complexioned children. As soon as they can wipe off the sweat of the day,