Voltaire (or was it Lord Chesterfield?) once declared that human beings should be divided into three classes, ‘Men, Women and Herveys’; while Dr. Johnson was wont to say, ‘Call a dog Hervey, and I shall love him.’ These two celebrated utterances aptly hit off the characteristics of a brilliant family intimately associated with English history and literature. For the Herveys were almost all of them eccentric to a degree, and yet at the same time possessed of a superlative charm.

John, Lord Hervey of Ickworth, the friend of Queen Caroline of Anspach, and the writer of those invaluable memoirs on which every historian of the reign of George II to-day so greatly relies, had for his third son a remarkable being who figures largely in not only the England but the Europe of the eighteenth century. Frederick Hervey, Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry, the ‘mitred Proteus’ of Horace Walpole, the ‘wicked prelate’ of George III, the ‘episcopal patriot’ of Northern Ireland, the ‘modern Maecenas’ of artists and sculptors, and the ‘man plenteous in good works’ of John Wesley, if he left no mark on his age as author or statesman or courtier, was a cosmopolitan personage whom we meet with in every memoir, diary, newspaper, and letter of his time, and whose memory as a wealthy epicurean, open-handed globe-trotter is still kept alive by the inevitable ‘Hotel Bristol’ found in every continental town. The foreigner’s fixed and traditional idea of the rich, mad, restless English ‘milord’ can be largely traced in its origin to him.