’Lady Townshend told me an admirable history:  it is of our friend Lady Pomfret.  Somebody that belonged to the Prince of Wales said, they were going to court; it was objected that they ought to say to Carlton House; that the only court is where the king resides.  Lady P., with her paltry air of significant learning and absurdity, said, “Oh, Lord!  Is there no court in England but the king’s?  Sure, there are many more!  There is the Court of Chancery, the Court of Exchequer, the Court of King’s Bench, &c.”  Don’t you love her?  Lord Lincoln does her daughter—­Lady Sophia Fermor.  He is come over, and met me and her the other night; he turned pale, spoke to her several times in the evening, but not long, and sighed to me at going away.  He came over all alone; and not only his Uncle Duke (the Duke of Newcastle) but even Majesty is fallen in love with him.  He talked to the king at his levee, without being spoken to.  That was always thought high treason; but I don’t know how the gruff gentleman liked it.  And then he had been told that Lord Lincoln designed to have made the campaign, if we had gone to war; in short, he says Lord Lincoln is the handsomest man in England.’

Horace was not, therefore, the only victim to a mother’s ambition:  there is something touching in the interest he from time to time evinces in poor Lord Lincoln’s hopeless love.  On another occasion, a second ball of Sir Thomas Robinson’s, Lord Lincoln, out of prudence, dances with Lady Caroline Fitzroy, Mr. Conway taking Lady Sophia Fermor.  ’The two couple were just admirably mismatched, as everybody soon perceived, by the attentions of each man to the woman he did not dance with, and the emulation of either lady; it was an admirable scene.’

All, however, was not country dancing:  the young man, ’too old and too young to be in love,’ was to make his way as a wit.  He did so, in the approved way in that day of irreligion, in a political squib.  On July 14th, 1742, he writes in his Notes, ’I wrote the “Lessons for the Day;” the “Lessons for the day” being the first and second chapters of the “Book of Preferment,"’ Horace was proud of this brochure, for he says it got about surreptitiously, and was ’the original of many things of that sort.’  Various jeux d’esprit of a similar sort followed.  A ‘Sermon on Painting,’ which was preached before Sir Robert Walpole, in the gallery at Houghton, by his chaplain; ’Patapan, or the Little White Dog,’ imitated from La Fontaine.  No. 38 of the ‘Old England Journal,’ intended to ridicule Lord Bath; and then, in a magazine, was printed his ‘Scheme for a Tax on Message Cards and Notes.’  Next the ‘Beauties,’ which was also handed about, and got into print.  So that without the vulgarity of publishing, the reputation of the dandy writer was soon noised about.  His religious tenets may or may not have been sound; but at all events the tone of his mind assumed at this time a very different character to that reverent strain in which, when a youth at college, he had apostrophized those who bowed their heads beneath the vaulted roof of King’s College, in his eulogium in the character of Henry VI.