The Queen narrates a sort of quarrel which she had with Lady Suffolk, a woman so notoriously scandalous, that the wife of George II. ought not to have suffered her to approach her person. The quarrel was, as a note conceives it, not about holding a basin for the Queen to wash in, but about holding it on her knees. (What person of any degree of self-respect can discover the difference?) But Lady Suffolk, on this nice distinction, consulted the well-known Lady Masham, bedchamber woman to Queen Anne, as to the point of etiquette. This authority delivered her judgment of chambermaid duties, in the following style:—“When the Queen washed her hands, a page of the backstairs brought and set down upon a side-table the basin and ewer. Then the bedchamber _woman_ set it before the Queen, and _knelt_ on the other side of the table over against the Queen, the bedchamber _lady_ only looking on. The bedchamber _woman_ brought in the chocolate, and gave it _kneeling_.” Lady Suffolk, formerly Mrs Howard, had been bedchamber _woman_, and of course had performed this menialism! “We shall see by-and-by,” adds the note, “that, the _lady_ of the bedchamber, though a countess, presented the basin for the Queen’s washing, _on her knees_.” If such things were done, we must own that it wholly exceeds our comprehension how they could be exacted on the one side, or submitted to on the other. We are sure that there is not a scullion in England who would stoop to hold a basin for her mistress’s ablutions on her knees. Yet, however we may be surprised at the existence of such practices, it is impossible to feel the slightest sympathy for the persons whom their salaries tempt to the sufferance. We have left ourselves but little room for the biography of Lord Hervey himself. He was born in 1696, the second son of the first Lord Bristol. He travelled; returned to solicit a commission; failed in his solicitation; became, of course, “a virtuous opponent of the court,” and attached himself to the Prince and Princess, who held a sort of Opposition court at Richmond. Hervey, young, handsome, and polished, became a general favourite. He won the most accomplished woman of her time; married; and, in 1723, became Lord Hervey by the death of his elder brother, a man of ability, but of habits remarkably profligate. On the death of George I., Hervey changed his politics; abandoned Pulteney; leveed Walpole; obtained a pension of £1000 a-year; received another gilded fetter, in the office of vice-chamberlain, and became a courtier for life.