An Epistle from a Nobleman to a Doctor of Divinity.

The Volume is in Very Good to Fine Condition Disbound, with generally clean leaves, and with some small stains and fox marks otherwise.

Please take the time necessary to review the photos On Our Website in order to gain a better understanding of the content and condition of the volume.

John Hervey, 2nd Baron Hervey PC (13 October 1696 – 5 August 1743) was an English courtier and political writer and memoirist who was the eldest son of John Hervey, 1st Earl of Bristol, by his second wife,[1] Elizabeth. He was known as Lord Hervey from 1723, upon the death of his elder half-brother, Carr, the only son of his father’s first wife, Isabella, but Lord Hervey never became Earl of Bristol, as he predeceased his father.

Hervey wrote detailed and brutally frank memoirs of the court of George II from 1727 to 1737. He gave a most unflattering account of the King, and of Frederick, Prince of Wales, and their family squabbles. For the Queen and her daughter, Princess Caroline, he had a genuine respect and attachment, and the Princess’s affection for him was commonly said to be the reason for the close retirement in which she lived after his death.

Until the publication of the Memoirs Hervey was chiefly known as the object of savage satire on the part of Alexander Pope, in whose works he figured as Lord Fanny, Sporus, Adonis and Narcissus. The quarrel is generally put down to Pope’s jealousy of Hervey’s friendship with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. In the first of the Imitations of Horace, addressed to William Fortescue, Lord Fanny and Sappho were generally identified with Hervey and Lady Mary, although Pope denied the personal intention. Hervey had already been attacked in the Dunciad and the Peribathous, and he now retaliated. There is no doubt that he had a share in the Verses to the Imitator of Horace (1732) and it is possible that he was the sole author. In the Letter from a nobleman at Hampton Court to a Doctor of Divinity (1733), he scoffed at Pope’s deformity and humble birth. 

The public on the whole judged Hervey’s poem ‘Letter from a Nobleman’ as reckless and foolish. Indeed several of Pope’s acquaintances took up the gauntlet defending Pope and ridiculing Hervey.

Pope’s reply was a Letter to a Noble Lord, dated November 1733, and the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot. (1735) that famously contains Pope’s savage attack on Lord Hervey, who is named “Paris” here but “Sporus” in subsequent editions: “Let Paris tremble” – “What? that Thing of silk, Paris, that mere white Curd of Ass’s milk? Satire or Shame alas! Can Paris feel? Who breaks a Butterfly upon a Wheel?”. Again in 1743, Hervey is memorably portrayed as Sporus, the castrated boy whom Nero had transformed into his wife.

The malicious caricature of Sporus does Hervey great injustice, and he is not much better treated by Horace Walpole, who in reporting his death in a letter (14 August 1743) to Horace Mann, said he had outlived his last inch of character. Nevertheless, his writings prove him to have been a man of real ability, condemned by Walpole’s tactics and distrust of able men to spend his life in court intrigue, the weapons of which, it must be owned, he used with the utmost adroitness.