“ Men, .Women and Herveys " AUGUSTUS H ERVEY, third Earl of
Bristol, was a member of that strange family which included John, Lord Hervey, the chronicler of George 11's Court; Frederick, the grandiloquent and eccentric Bishop- Earl; and the rakes Tom and Harry, whom Dr. Johnson loved. For two generations, it produced a series of curious and often g fted individuals, several of them epileptic, many foppish, dissolute and bellicose, who quarrelled -and pamphleteered incessantly through much of the 'eighteenth century. Even their notably robust wi -Id • professed to find them a species apart, "men, women and Hel vuys."
It introduces us to a new, if minor, character on the eighteenth- century stage. Hervey himself has summed up his disposition: "I cared very little about anything but my pleasure in those days till I got to sea, and then my profession was all my pleasure." The pleasures on shore, if numerous, were usually of one kind. Hervey enjoyed women to an extent that has impelled his editor to dub him "the English Casanova." (The two men met in London, as it happens, in 1763.) His conquests, from the Duchess of Chartres in France and the noble ladies in the nunneries of Portugal, to the lights-of-love in London and Paris and the women of the sea ports, were indeed extraordinary in their frequency and range, and are recounted with a casual and unaffected charm which may have contributed to his success. But they do not seem to have affected his judgment at sea. He proved a competent commander, first in the Mediterranean and later on the French blockade and in the West Indies.
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