‘Men are not all evil:’  so in the life of George Villiers, we find him kind-hearted, and free from hypocrisy.  His old servants—­and the fact speaks in extenuation of one of our wildest Wits and Beaux—­loved him faithfully.  De Grammont, we all own, has little to redeem him except his good-nature:  Rochester’s latest days were almost hallowed by his penitence.  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.

Of these, and others, ‘table traits,’ and other traits, are here given:  brief chronicles of their life’s stage, over which a curtain has so long been dropped, are supplied carefully from well established sources:  it is with characters, not with literary history, that we deal; and do our best to make the portraitures life-like, and to bring forward old memories, which, without the stamp of antiquity, might be suffered to pass into obscurity.

Your Wit and your Beau, be he French or English, is no mediaeval personage:  the aristocracy of the present day rank among his immediate descendants:  he is a creature of a modern and an artificial age; and with his career are mingled many features of civilized life, manners, habits, and traces of family history which are still, it is believed, interesting to the majority of English readers, as they have long been to

Grace and Philip Wharton

October, 1860.

* * * * *

         THE WITS AND BEAUX OF SOCIETY.

* * * * *

GEORGE VILLIERS, SECOND DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM.