Nevertheless, it peeps out soon after that the ‘Pomfrets’ are coming back.  Horace had known them in Italy.  The Earl and Countess and their daughters were just then the very pink of fashion; and even the leaders of all that was exclusive in the court.  Half in ridicule, half in earnest, are the remarks which, throughout all the career of Horace, incessantly occur.  ’I am neither young enough nor old enough to be in love,’ he says; yet that he was in love with one of the lovely Fermors is traditionary still in the family—­and that tradition pointed at Lady Juliana, the youngest, afterwards married to Mr. Penn.  The Earl of Pomfret had been master of the horse to Queen Caroline:  Lady Pomfret, lady of the bed-chamber.  ‘My Earl,’ as the-countess styled him, was apparently a supine subject to her ladyship’s strong will and wrong-headed ability—­which she, perhaps, inherited from her grandfather, Judge Jeffreys; she being the daughter and heiress of that rash young Lord Jeffreys, who, in a spirit of braggadocia, stopped the funeral of Dryden on its way to Westminster, promising a more splendid procession than the poor, humble cortege—­a boast which he never fulfilled.  Lady Sophia Fermor, the eldest daughter, who afterwards became the wife of Lord Carteret, resembled, in beauty, the famed Mistress Arabella Fermor, the heroine of the ‘Rape of the Lock.’  Horace Walpole admired Lady Sophia—­whom he christened Juno—­intensely.  Scarcely a letter drips from his pen—­as a modern novelist used to express it[4]—­without some touch of the Pomfrets.  Thus to Sir Horace Mann, then a diplomatist at Florence:—­

[4:  The accomplished novelist, Mrs. Gore, famous for her facility, used to say that a three-volume novel just ‘dripped from her pen.’]

’Lady Pomfret I saw last night.  Lady Sophia has been ill with a cold; her head is to be dressed French, and her body English, for which I am sorry, her figure is so fine in a robe.  She is full as sorry as I am.’

Again, at a ball at Sir Thomas Robinson’s, where four-and-twenty couples danced country-dances, in two sets, twelve and twelve, ’there was Lady Sophia, handsomer than ever, but a little out of humour at the scarcity of minuets; however, as usual, dancing more than anybody, and, as usual too, she took out what men she liked, or thought the best dancers.’...’We danced; for I country-danced till four, then had tea and coffee, and came home.’  Poor Horace!  Lady Sophia was not for a younger son, however gay, talented, or rich he might be.

His pique and resentment towards her mother, who had higher views for her beautiful daughter, begin at this period to show themselves, and never died away.

Lady Townshend was the wit who used to gratify Horace with tales of her whom he hated—­Henrietta-Louisa, Countess of Pomfret.