Chesterfield is saved by his kindness to the Irish, and his
affection for his son. Horace Walpole had human affections, though a
most inhuman pen: and Wharton was famous for his good-humour.
The periods most abounding in the Wit and the Beau have, of course, been
those most exempt from wars, and rumours of wars. The Restoration; the
early period of the Augustan age; the commencement of the Hanoverian
dynasty,--have all been enlivened by Wits and Beaux, who came to light
like mushrooms after a storm of rain, as soon as the political horizon
was clear. We have Congreve, who affected to be the Beau as well as the
Wit; Lord Hervey, more of the courtier than the Beau--a Wit by
inheritance--a peer, assisted into a pre-eminent position by royal
preference, and consequent _prestige_; and all these men were the
offspring of the particular state of the times in which they figured: at
earlier periods, they would have been deemed effeminate; in later ones,
absurd.
Then the scene shifts: intellect had marched forward gigantically: the
world is grown exacting, disputatious, critical, and such men as Horace
Walpole and Brinsley Sheridan appear; the characteristics of wit which
adorned that age being well diluted by the feebler talents of Selwyn and
Hook.
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