in spite of her utmost endeavors to be angry no more resemblance to the genuine and look grave, provoked an immoderate love-letters of their day than to those of fit of laughter, from which time he became ours, and the two things were probably her implacable enemy. never confounded in the mind of either On this hypothesis, Leigh Hunt, party." In her replies she ignores all sympathizing with the poet, whom he his extravagant compliments, adopting supposes led on and then ridiculed by a cool tone of intellectual sympathy. a heartless beauty, addressed to Lady And when on her way back to England, Mary's shade an eloquent remon- she replies to his fervid congratulations strance. Her later biographers do not on her return:

you for rejoicing at what displeases me so much. . . 'tis not from insensibility of the joy of seeing my friends. . . but when I consider that I must at the same time see and hear a thousand disagreeable impertinents; that I am a creature that cannot serve anybody but with insignificant good wishes; and that my presence is not a necessary good to any one member of my native country, I think I might much better have stayed where ease and quiet made up the happiness of my indolent life.

believe the romantic version. They I can hardly forbear being angry with think her parody on Pope's "Rustic Lovers," and Lady Mary's general propensity for sharp sayings, leading to a war of words with nearly all her friends in turn, quite enough to account for a feud which, growing in bitterness with every stinging epigram on either side, joined in by Lord Hervey, Swift, and others, and intensified by fierce political antagonism, was certainly not the least among the causes that impelled her long absence from her native country. They think Lady Louisa Stuart's story “a tradition," and cite in support of their view Pope's assertion that he had no misunderstanding with Lady Mary until he was "the author of his own misfortune in discontinuing her acquaintance;" and her remark to Spence : You shall see what a goddess he makes me in some of his letters, though he makes such a devil of me in his writings afterwards, without any reason that I know of."

66

The letters all passed through Mr. Wortley's hands, yet he continued Pope's friend after his return from his embassy.

And when Pope put some of them into circulation subsequent to the quarrel, he first so manipulated them as to heighten the appearance of sentimental familiarity.

The

Lady Mary's withdrawal from England has been made the theme of speculations as numerous and diverse as the ground of her quarrel with Pope; yet it seems quite intelligible. warm exacting affection which Mr. Wortley had repulsed in the early days of marriage had changed into a very real and friendly respect, which could be, and was, as well manifested in abas in presence. Lady Mary's sence daughter had married the Earl of Bute,2

1 One brief specimen of this may be given from

But even supposing Pope's addresses to have been so offered and so rejected one cannot, remembering the highly artificial nature of all his passions, the rapidity and ingenuity with which his apparently most ardent tributes, both in verse and prose, were adapted in turn to each“ Cynthia of the minute," and the gall and mire with which he soiled his brilliant pen when Cynthia offended him, think his case deserved the indignant sympathy it has excited. He was a recent acquaintance when dreaming of you in moonshiny nights, exactly in Lady Mary went to Turkey, yet he im- the posture of Endymion gaping for Cynthia in a mediately wrote to her what her grand-picture. And with just such a surprise and rapdaughter calls "high heroic fustian." "The fashion was a French importation." says Mr. Moy Thomas," which the hostile tariffs of the Whigs were unfortunately unable to prevent. It bore!

Pope's letters to Lady Mary: "I fancy myself in my romantic thoughts and distant admiration of you not unlike the man in the Alchemist' that has a passion for the queen of the fairies. I lie

ture should I awake, if after your long revolutions were accomplished you should at last come rolling back again, smiling with all that gentleness and serenity peculiar to the moon and you, and gilding the same mountains from which you first set out on your solemn melancholy journey."

2 Groom of the stole to Frederick Prince of

and formed interests and a circle of her of a domino" formed "the genteel

own; her son had hopelessly alienated dress to carry you everywhere." Above all his friends by a Fleet marriage with all "it is so much the established a laundress old enough to be his mother, fashion for everybody to live their own and nothing was to be looked for from way that nothing is more ridiculous him but fresh scandals; the care of than censuring the actions of another." Lady Mar had, by Mr. Wortley's desire, Rome also detained her, and she been transferred to her daughter, Lady opened her doors to the English visitors Frances Erskine; Lady Mary was ill (who were much thrown on their own and weary, both in body and mind resources, not being then received by there had been sorrows enough in her Roman ladies) with such good effect life to shake the strongest. Travel, that the Abbé Grant told her she was which she loved, and a milder climate, bound in conscience to pass her life had irresistible attractions for her. there for the benefit of her countrymen. And she hoped to meet Lady Pomfret, She saw "bonnie Prince Charlie" and for whom she had a strong affection, his brother, afterwards Cardinal York, and who, since the madness of Lady Mar, had been her most confidential correspondent.

at a public ball.

els.

They were very richly adorned with jewThe eldest seems thoughtless enough the youngest is very well made, dances finely, and has an ingenuous countenance.

...

...

The family live very splendidly, yet pay everybody, and (wherever they get it) are certainly in no want of money.

It is certain that this project of residing abroad had been long in contemplation; that at first she tried to prevail on Mr. Wortley to go with her; and that it was on the most amicable terms, and with a promise of his joining her, that When, in the course of her wanderthey parted in 1739.1 At every stage ings Lady Mary arrived at Lyons, she of her journey they corresponded, and found several letters from Mr. Wortley, Mr. Wortley's appreciation of her let-in one of which he urged her to meet ters-in his dry and formal way-is shown by the following passage from one of his replies: "If you mention a

few of the great towns you have passed, I shall see the whole journey. I wish (if it be easy) you would be exact and clear in your facts, because I shall lay by carefully what you write of your travels."

Lady Mary's first long delay was in Venice, where the varied society and the simple manner of life alike charmed her. She found that it was the fashion for the greatest ladies to walk in the admirably paved streets; that gondolas were delightfully cheap; that "a sixpenny mask, a little cloak, and the head

Wales, and afterwards George the Third's favorite

minister.

their son, who was again applying for help and promising reform. He expresses the fullest confidence in her

judgment, and authorizes her to do and to promise whatever she thinks may be for his good. The impression left by the meeting was not favorable :

He is so much altered in his person I

should scarcely have known him. ↑ He has entirely lost his beauty, and looks at least seven years older than he is, and the wildmuch increased it is downright shocking, ness that he always had in his eyes is so and I am afraid will end fatally. . . . With his head I believe it is possible to make him a monk one day and a Turk three days after. He has a flattering, insinuating manner, which naturally prejudices strangers in his favor. . . . He has a superficial universal knowledge. He really knows most of the modern languages, and, if I can believe him, can read Arabic and has read the Bible in Hebrew.

...

She fears, however, that no influence, not even self-interest, will permanently reform him, and places no reliance on his promises of good behavior. The

event proved how accurate her judg-in France," she says, "is as impossible ment was. He showed through life, to be attained as orange-trees on the "an absolute incapacity for speaking mountains of Scotland. It is not the the truth" begged, borrowed, and product of the climate.” And she comcheated for money wherever he went; plains that her home correspondents sat in Parliament for a time, travelled tell her no news. "I suppose you know much, married many wives, and, inher- everything that passes here," they say; iting £1,000 a year from his father, or, "Here is nothing worth troubling lived abroad entirely. While in the you with." She does, however, hear East he is said to have become first a of the death of Pope, and the news Roman Catholic and then a Moham- evokes no acrimony, only a passing medan. He was a very discreditable wonder "to whom he has left the convert to either creed. The once well-enjoyment of his pretty house at Twickknown Dr. E. V. Kenealy founded a enham.” His will, she says later, "apnovel on his strange history.

1

pears more reasonable and less vain than I had expected of him." Lady Mary's letters to her husband reflect, in a calmer strain, the same anxiety for tidings of him, the same regret at his cold reticence with which their married life began. She tells him that her daughter has been long silent," which gives me the greatest uneasiness; but the most sensible part of it is in regard of your health, which is truly and sincerely the dearest concern I have in this world.”

While Lady Mary was staying at Avignon in the early part of 1744, she was persuaded to accompany the Duchesse de Crillon to an entertainment given by the Freemasons of Nismes to the Duc de Richelieu. "They almost carried me with them by force," she writes, which I am tempted to believe an act of Providence, considering my great reluctance, and the service it proved to be to unhappy, innocent people." She had only been two hours in the town when some Huguenot ladies Lady Mary was driven from Avignon begged her, with tears, to intercede by the swarms of Jacobite refugees with the Duc de Richelieu on behalf of who infested it in 1746, so that it was the Protestant minister and a dozen of impossible to go into company withhis congregation who had been cruelly out hearing a conversation improper to imprisoned. They said "none of the be listened to and dangerous to contraCatholics would do it, and the Protes-dict." But the unsettled state of the tants durst not, and God had sent me Continent made it very difficult to get for their protection. The Duc de Riche-away, and a certain Count Palazzo, genlieu was too well-bred to refuse to listen to a lady, and I was of a rank and nation to say what I pleased."

tleman of the bedchamber to the Prince of Saxony, who brought Lady Mary letters of introduction from her friend the Count of Wackerbarth, persuaded her to travel under his escort as a Venetian lady. It was an adventurous journey, of which she gives a full account to Mr. Wortley. On leaving Genoa they found the Bocchetta Pass almost blocked by the baggage and the sick and wounded of the Spanish army after its defeat at Piacenza. At Serravalle they met a large body of troops, "in the midst of which was Don Philip in person, going a very round trot, looking down, and pale as ashes." The inns were filled with wounded Spaniards, but the governor granted the "Venetian lady" the shelter of an empty

room, without bed or supper. At day-Hill. Here she bought an old château break the victorious Austrians entered and thoroughly identified herself with the town, and to them Count Palazzo Italian country life, tending and helpdisclosed Lady Mary's identity, on which they ordered her a guard of hussars, and treated her as a heroine. "This journey has been very expensive," she tells Mr. Wortley, on reaching Brescia; "but I am very glad I have made it. I am now in a neutral country, under the protection of Venice. The doge is our old friend Grimani, and I do not doubt meeting with all sorts of civility."

Here, however, occurred the third incident in her career of which calumny made capital, and which friendship could not entirely elucidate. On her arrival at Brescia she was met by Count Palazzo's mother, who insisted on taking Lady Mary to her own house, where she was seized with a fever so violent that she says few women of her age (sixty-one) could have recovered from it. When next she wrote to Mr. Wortley she told him she had kept her bed for two months, but that Countess Palazzo had taken as much care of her as if she had been a sister, and she could not sufficiently express her gratitude.

ing the villagers with so much success that she says she is thought a great physician, and would be thought a saint if she went to mass. She allowed them to act plays in her salon, which they fitted up cleverly as a theatre, and taught them (regardless of their digestions) to make "French rolls, custards, minced pies, and plum-puddings; and "as good butter as that produced in any part of Great Britain." No wonder the grateful inhabitants of Lovere desired to erect a statue to their benefactress, ordered the marble, commissioned the sculptor, and were sorely disappointed when she refused to sit to him, fearing that she would be accused in England of erecting her own monument! The only civil excuse she could think of, with which to put off her baffled admirers, was that her religion would not permit her to be made a graven image of.

Lady Mary passed her days amongst her poultry, her bees, her silkworms, her vineyards, and in a wonderful garden, where she made "a dining-room On some perverted version of this of verdure, capable of holding a table brief seclusion (she was in a house of of twenty covers" and "fifteen bowers her own by the following March) Wal- in different views with seats of turf.” 2 pole must have based his scandalous She walked in her wood, carpeted with gossip. But there was some serious violets and "inhabited by a nation of quarrel with the Palazzos, for their nightingales and game of all kinds," or names never again occur in her letters, descended by easy steps cut in the turf and amongst her papers was found a to her river, on which her fisherman statement in Italian, apparently drawn rowed her "in a little boat with a green up for production in a court of law, lutestring awning." As a resource for describing her detention against her the evenings, her failing sight no longer will in a country house inhabited by an allowing her to read continuously, she Italian count and his mother. Lord taught some old priests to play whist Wharncliffe conjectures that they endeavored to extort money from her

for penny points.

Sometimes this tranquil life is broken while invalided under their roof. In in upon by parties of thirty ladies and any case, the friendship ceased as suddenly as it began.

Later, Lady Mary suffered much from ague, and was sent by her doctors to Lovere, the "most beautifully romantic place she ever saw, with gardens which reminded her of Richmond

1 He told Mann that he had heard of her being "shut up by a lover somewhere in the Brescian."

gentlemen who arrive on horseback, with their servants, and expect to be entertained for a fortnight. Or some neighboring ladies favor her with a visit in masquerade. "They were all

2 "Gardening is certainly the next amusement to reading," she says. "I am glad to form a taste that will be the amusement of my age now my pen and needle are almost useless to me."

dressed in white like vestal virgins,” | calls "a strange fellow. I heartily she tells her daughter, "with garlands despise him and eagerly read him, nay, in their hands. They came at night with violins and flambeaux, but did not stay more than once dance, pursuing their way to another castle some miles from hence."

I wonder [she says] he does not perceive that Tom Jones and Mr. Booth are both sorry scoundrels. All these sort of books have the same fault, which I cannot easily pardon, being very mischievous. They place a merit in extravagant passions, and encourage young people to hope for imposIn the same spirit Lady Mary says: sible events, to draw them out of the misery they chose to plunge themselves into, exI have often had a mind to write you a pecting legacies from unknown relations consolatory epistle on my own death, which and generous benefactors to distressed vir- I believe will be some affliction, though my tue, as much out of nature as fairy treas-life is wholly useless to you. That part of

There are many other lively bits of criticism on which one would like to dwell if space allowed, such as the happy comment on Johnson's "Rambler:"" He always plods in the beaten road of his predecessors, following The Spectator' (with the same pace a pack-credit Walpole when, after calling Lady Bute horse would a hunter) in the style that "one of the best and sensible women in the is proper to lengthen a paper. . . . I should be glad to know the name of this laborious author." Richardson she

world," who "has never made a false step," he says she was "educated by such a mother-or

rather, with no education at all." Lady Mary was far too shrewd a woman to have appealed to her 4280