Page:Hutton, William Holden - Hampton Court (1897).djvu/304

216 contempt. Pope was in all these things a contrast to his enemy. Again, Lord Hervey was for a long time more intimate, as an individual, with the inner life of the King and Queen and the court than any other man in England. He had claims to be a statesman: he had the deserved reputation of a wit: and he had the misfortune to attempt to be a poet and a satirist—to shine in verse in the manner in which Pope was supreme.

Pope and Lord Hervey represent not inadequately to us the literary associations of Hampton Court, and it is that Palace which first makes us link their names together. It was the charming maids of honour, Miss Lepel and Miss Bellenden, who brought the poet to Hampton Court, taking him none too seriously,

And here it was, or at Richmond, that Lord Hervey found a home when his kindred were engaged in their duties of waiting on the Prince and Princess of Wales—"dapper George" and "cette diablesse la Princesse." Soon he won the heart of the charming half French beauty, than whom, says Lady Louisa Stuart, "there never was so perfect a model of the finely polished, highly bred, genuine woman of fashion." In 1720 the attachment was notorious.