Note 1531 — AN ESSAY ON MAN, IN FOUR EPISTLES (continued 3)

Lord Umbra may have stood for a dozen insignificant peers who had the ribbon of some order. Sir Billy was Sir William Yonge, who was made a Knight of the Bath when the order was revived in May, 1725. "Without having done anything," says Lord Hervey, "out of the common track of a ductile courtier, and a parliamentary tool, his name was proverbially used to express everything pitiful, corrupt, and contemptible." His one talent was a fluency which sounded like eloquence, and meant nothing, and this ready flow of specious language, unaccompanied by solid reasoning or conviction, and always exerted on behalf of his patron, Walpole, rendered his unconditional subserviency conspicuous.