She
had complained that she was too old to inspire a passion (a sort of
challenge for a compliment), on which he wrote: 'I should think anybody
a great fool that said he liked spring better than summer, merely
because it is further from autumn, or that they loved green fruit better
than ripe only because it was further from being rotten. I ever did, and
believe ever shall, like woman best--
'"Just in the noon of life--those golden days,
When the mind ripens ere the form decays."'
Certainly this looks very unlike a pure Platonic, and it is not to be
wondered at that Lady Hervey refused to call on Lady Mary, when, long
after Lord Hervey's death, that fascinating woman returned to England. A
wit, a courtier at the very fount of all politeness, Lord Hervey wanted
the genuine source of all social qualities--Christianity. That moral
refrigerator which checks the kindly current of neighbourly kindness,
and which prevents all genial feeling from expanding, produced its usual
effect--misanthropy. Lord Hervey's lines, in his 'Satire after the
manner of Persius,' describe too well his own mental canker:--
'Mankind I know, their motives and their art,
Their vice their own, their virtue best apart,
Till played so oft, that all the cheat can tell,
And dangerous only when 'tis acted well.
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