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 mediæval