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;