A New Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

THE LETTERS of Lady Mary, as edited by Mr. W. Moy Thomas, with the editor’s Memoir, and the Introductory Notes of her granddaughter, Lady Louisa Stuart, had, I confess, never been able to dispel the impression of that female wit left by the two satirists, who in succession link the whole eighteenth century together with a chain of glittering scandal. So much is there omitted from her correspondence, so much of the panegyric must be taken on credit, that in the end memory still reads under the portrait Pope’s “Furious Sappho” and Walpole’s “ Moll Worthless.”

Unfortunately, it cannot be said that the new work ¹ by Miss E. M. Symonds (“ George Paston ”) clears up the real obscurity of her career, for at the very critical point of the story the documents are still in part missing and in part withheld. But it does add a good deal to our knowledge of another period, and so far serves strongly to justify the wife — at the expense of the husband. I say period, for Lady Mary’s life, more than is commonly the case, was sharply marked off by circumstances. There are at the beginning the years of her courtship and early married experience; these are followed by the long journey through Europe and the residence in Turkey; then, for the third period, we find her again in Great Britain, now a confessed belle and wit, one of the leaders of the notorious circle of Twickenham; and, last, comes the lonely exile in Italy and France, with the final journey home to arrange her affairs and to die.

Now, for one of these periods, the first, Miss Symonds has a mass of new and really enlightening material. By the kindness of the Earl of Harrowby she was permitted to examine the Wortley-Montagu manuscripts at Sandon Hall, where she found a hundred and more unpublished letters from Lady Mary, with some fifty or sixty written by Mr. Wortley; and it is no exaggeration to say that the portions of these printed in the present memoir give us the clue to one of the most extraordinary tales of courtship and elopement ever enacted.

Mary Pierrepont was born in London, in 1689, her father being the greatgrandson of the first Earl of Kingston and himself afterwards the fifth earl. Her infancy she passed with her grandmother, but from her eighth year, her mother and grandmother being both dead, she grew up without any proper feminine oversight. Her father, she says in an autobiographical fragment, “ though naturally an honest man, was abandoned to his pleasures, and (like most of those of his quality) did not think himself obliged to be very attentive to his children’s education.” But he was at least proud of his little daughter, and one of his acts shows her in a situation so picturesque in itself and so significant, that it cannot be omitted here, however familiar it may be from repetition. Lady Louisa Stuart tells the story : —

“ As a leader of the fashionable world, and a strenuous Whig in party, he of course belonged to the Kit-Cat Club. One day, at a meeting to choose toasts for the year, a whim seized him to nominate her, then not eight years old, a candidate; alleging that she was far prettier than any lady on their list. The other members demurred, because the rules of the club forbade them to elect a beauty whom they had never seen. ' Then you shall see her,’ cried he; and in the gaiety of the moment sent orders home to have her finely dressed and brought to him at the tavern, where she was received with acclamations, her claim unanimously allowed, her health drunk by every one present, and her name engraved in due form upon a drinking-glass. The company consisting of some of the most eminent men in England, she went from the lap of one poet, or patriot, or statesman, to the arms of another, was feasted with sweetmeats, overwhelmed with caresses, and, what perhaps already pleased her better than either, heard her wit and beauty loudly extolled on every side. Pleasure, she said, was too poor a word to express her sensations; they amounted to ecstasy; never again, throughout her whole future life, did she pass so happy a day.”

Poor little lady! it seems that even in childhood she was to be the victim of her wit and beauty; she little recked how ruthlessly in later life men were to deal with these lauded gifts. But there was an extraordinary trial of patience and submission for her to undergo before she came to the real battle of life. Among her girl friends in London were Anne and Katherine Wortley Montagu, at whose home she became acquainted with that small wit and unconscionable prig, Edward Wortley Montagu, the friend of Addison and Steele, the “ Gripus ” and “ Avidien ” of Pope.

When, in 1709, she went to Thoresby in the country she must of course exchange letters with her dear Anne at Wharncliffe some thirty miles away, and what more natural than that the brother should take a hand in the correspondence ? At first he merely directs his sister, speaking of himself in the third person; but he becomes more and more in evidence, and after the death of Anne, in that same year, we find him writing to Lady Mary as a professed but secret lover. He did indeed approach her father for her hand, and was at first favored. But an obstinate quarrel soon arose over the settlements; Mr. Wortley, who showed early the penurious traits that afterwards grew to a vice, refused to settle property on an unborn heir who might — as indeed he proved in the sequence to do — turn out a spendthrift and wanton; while Lady Mary’s father would not risk seeing his grandchildren left beggars. Pin-money and jointures also came in to embitter the wrangle. Mr. Wortley’s arguments on that topic may be read in one of the Tatler papers, worked up by Steele from his notes, and the whole ignoble dispute furnished Richardson with his material for the episode of Sir Thomas Grandison and his daughter Caroline.

The twists and turns of the correspondence that followed between the young man and the young woman, the clandestine meetings at the house of Richard Steele and elsewhere, the secret messengers, the bribery of servants, the evasions and hesitations, the romantic elopement in the end — all these may be read in the letters quoted by Miss Symonds; a tale not easily matched in the tortuous-wooing fiction of the age. In the end Lady Mary comes out far better than her swain; it is clear that she fell heartily in love with her incomprehensible suitor, and endured his bickerings and insulting insinuations despite the protests of reason and pride. She has her maidenly reserves in language, and at times she can argue with canny prudence; but on the whole one gets from her letters the impression of a troubled common sense and of a natural girlishness playing the rôle of wisdom.

Mr. Wortley is simply an insufferable egoist; it is not easy to use language too strong for his ignoble jealousies. He has been compared, not inaptly, with Sir Willoughby Patterne, — a very stodgy and mercenary Sir Willoughby, one must add, — and Lady Mary in these early years might be likened not unfairly to Clara Middleton. Mr. Wortley’s game is simply to draw out the lady’s unshamed confession of love without compromising his own calculating reserve, and to subdue her to complete absorption in himself without surrendering any of his own precious independence. It is, in the second part at least, a well-recognized masculine sport, but you resent the spectacle when the fairest and wittiest woman in England is the victim, and you are not unprepared to pardon if in due time she gets her revenge.

This intriguing despotism might be dismissed with calling the gentleman a cad, or a “ puppy,” to take the word of his own day, but you cannot help asking all the while what it is that so keeps his suspicions and jealousies on edge. Granted the initial wrong of deceiving her father, the language and acts of Lady Mary were, so far as they appear, without reproach. At first his complaints arc inexplicable, and then, as you read, a certain note comes up so frequently that you begin to discern a reason which, if it does not excuse, yet throws some light on his uneasiness. “ Could any woman,” he says, “ write with so much wit, and be so much upon her guard, with one she was afraid of losing?” And again, “I beg you will this once try to avoid being witty, and to write in a style of business, tho’ it should appear to you as flat as mine.” And still more frankly, “ Shall I tell you how to deceive me, if you think it worth your while ? Avoid seeming witty (which all do naturally when they are serious), and say nothing that does not seem probable.”

The simple fact is that this dull, plodding fellow felt the superiority of Lady Mary’s mind, and winced at it. He could not understand her vivacity, which at once attracted and disconcerted him. It is the same story that makes the whole triumph and tragedy of her life. As a wit precociously versed in the classics and endowed with the seemingly incongruous charm of beauty, Lady Mary first attracted her husband and afterwards conquered society; it was the same quality that awakened his suspicions and in the end helped to drive her out of England. She might well have wished the words of Ovid inscribed on her tomb: INGENIO PERII. trusting that the world would not add: tenerorum lusor amorum.

But of her character as a wit it will be time to speak more specifically when she has returned from Constantinople in the fullness of her reputation. For a while after her marriage, in 1712, she was considerately kept in the country, while her jealous and already neglectful lord attended to business and pleasure—and commonly the two were one to that prudent soul — in the city. ' Part of the time she was alone, at other times she stayed with her husband’s relatives or was graced with his own condescending presence. There were cares of house-furnishing and housekeeping to occupy her, and in due season the nursing of her son, who was to turn out one of the reproaches of England and the particular horror of his mother. She endured dutifully these years of surly neglect, but the experience left its sting, and apparently helped to harden her character. “ I was then [1714] in Yorkshire,” she afterwards wrote. “ Mr. W. (who had at that time, that sort of passion for me, that would have made me invisible to all but himself, had it been in his power) had sent me thither. He stayed in town on the account of some business, and the Queen’s death detained him there.” The fretful ennui of “ The Bride in the Country ” forms the subject of one of her satirical ballads.

But release was near. She had aided her husband as she could, and even pushed him forward in his political ambitions.

In 1716 Mr. Wortley was appointed Ambassador to the Porte, and on August 1, he, with his wife, three-year old son, and suite set out for Constantinople. I shall not follow them on their journey across the Continent, nor try to give an account of what Lady Mary saw, and so vividly described, in Paris and Vienna, in the wild regions of Hungary, and then in the home of the Turk. She was an ideal traveler, adapting herself facilely to the customs of the place, and feeling no prudish alarm at the different moral codes that met her. In particular she writes with curious complacency of the Austrian “ sub-marriages,” and remarks of the Italian ladies that “ the custom of cicisbeos has very much improved their airs.” It is only fair to add her amusing apology from Vienna: “ I’ll assure you, a lady, who is very much my friend here, told me but yesterday, how much I was obliged to her for justifying my conduct in a conversation on my subject, where it was publicly asserted that I could not possibly have common sense, that I had been about town above a fortnight, and had made no steps towards commencing an amour.” And at Constantinople she found the ways of life peculiarly to her taste; the Turkish women she declared to be “ the only free people in the empire.”

All these things she described in letters of which, after the manner of the age, she kept faithful, or unfaithful, copies, or which she afterwards wrote up for the half-public from her diaries. On them her fame as a writer depends almost exclusively to-day, and it must be admitted that they fully deserve their reputation, Letters of travel somehow have generally less staying power than those from home; what they give can be better given in a formal treatise, while they miss the little touches of satire and friendship, the pleasant familiarities, the display of character at ease in its proper environment, which make the charm or the humor of the best correspondence. These qualities for the most part Lady Mary’s epistles, as they may be called, do not possess. But they have other traits, rarer, if less engaging. She shows a kind of familiarity with things strange, which carries the reader with her. Her language is clear and firm, but less formal than that of Pope and Bolingbroke and the other professed epistolary authors of the day. She puts a curb on their incurable trick of dealing in moral platitudes. In a word, she strikes the happy and difficult balance between the general and the particular, the descriptive and the personal. She stands to the front among the second grade of letter-writers.

One feels her excellence in a special way in the letters exchanged with Pope, who is here by no means at his best. For a short while before their departure for the East she had been permitted by Mr. Wortley to live in London and to renew her acquaintance with the intellectual society of whom Pope was the acknowledged chief, and it was under this exciting stimulus that she wrote her Town Eclogues, three of which the mysterious Curll published piratically, in 1715, under the title of Court Poems by a Lady of Quality, with the intimation that they were really composed by “ the laudable translator of Homer.” They were apparently handed about the coterie in manuscript, and were but one move in the dangerous game Lady Mary then began to play. At any rate, the intimacy between her and Pope quickly ripened to gallantry, and letters of the most exaggerated sentiment followed the lady on her Eastern wanderings. He would be a bold critic who should attempt to say how much of this philandering on the part of the little man was sincere, and how much a bad literary copy of the letters of Voiture; likely enough the writer himself would have been puzzled to discriminate; it was the prescribed rôle. We may give him the credit of believing that at times a note of genuine passion is heard breaking through, or making use of, the convention of the day — as in that, touching appeal to her after a fit of illness : —

“ This last winter has seen great revolutions in my little affairs. My sickness was preceded by the death of my father, which happened within a few days after I had writ to you inviting myself to meet you in your journey homewards. I have yet a mother of great age and infirmities, whose last precarious days of life I am now attending, with such a solemn pious kind of officiousness as a melancholy recluse watches the last risings and fallings of a dying taper. My natural temper is pretty much broke, and I live half a hermit within five miles of London [at Chiswick]. A letter from you soothes me in my reveries; it is like a conversation with some spirit of the other world, the least glimpse of whose favor sets one above all taste of the things of this: indeed, there is little or nothing angelical left behind you; the women here are — women. I cannot express how I long to see. you face to face; if ever you come again, I shall never be able to behave with decency. I shall walk, look and talk at such a rate, that all the town must know I have seen something more than human. Come, for God’s sake; come, Lady Mary; come quickly! ”

And how did the lady, addressed in these tones of almost blasphemous devotion, reply ? In the extreme of good sense, it must be allowed. From Vienna she had written the 14th September, 1716:

“ Perhaps you’ll laugh at me for thanking you gravely, for all the obliging concern you express for me. ’T is certain that I may, if I please, take the fine things you say to me for wit and raillery, and it may be it would be taking them right. But I never in my life was half so disposed to believe you in earnest; and that distance which makes the continuation of your friendship improbable, has very much increased my faith in it, and I find that I have (as well as the rest of my sex), whatever face I set on’t, a strong disposition to believe in miracles.”

That is not just the answer we may fancy to have been desired by a gentleman who no doubt preferred the wit to be all on his own side and the simplicity on the lady’s. If there is any one singleminded utterance in his correspondence, it is the exclamation: “ A plague of female wisdom: It makes a man ten times more uneasy than his wont.” Again, poor Lady Mary! she was yet to learn, what she might have guessed from such a confession, that superiority in a woman is an attraction that too often turns into what most repels.

There was, one sees, a pretty casus belli lurking under this exchange of courtesies from the beginning, and the quarrel, when it came, was sure to be bitter and relentless. In 1718 the Wortleys were recalled, and Lady Mary returned home reluctantly, carrying with her a daughter, — destined, after a season of anxiety, to give her as much satisfaction as her son was to bring disgrace, — the practice of inoculation, which with much difficulty she got naturalized in England, and — to join things disparate — a mind quite disencumbered of conventions.

In England, we soon find the family established at Twickenham, where Pope (it was Lady Mary herself who later on dubbed him “ the wicked wasp of Twickenham ”) had made himself the centre of a little society of wits, and from whence he shot his venomous bolts at any one who balked at his intellectual and moral supremacy. I should like, from the memoirs and letters of the day, to draw out a picture of that brilliant and perilous society. Across the river lay Richmond Lodge; Hampton Court and Kew, with their royal associations, were near by; Dawley, where Bolingbroke retired to sulk and scheme, was also within driving distance. And when the resources of these places failed, London offered its dissipations, was, indeed, already pushing its way up the river to absorb these half-rural retreats. Lady Mary, we may presume, was heartily welcomed into this circle. A “ rake at reading,” as she called herself, she had at the age of twenty translated the Latin version of Epictetus under the direction of Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury. Her satirical poems had already attracted notice, and her fame had been increased by her letters, which, after the manner of the day, were passed from hand to hand. Now, at the age of thirty, she was returning, in the full flush of her beauty, and with the glamour of the East upon her. Pope had made “ Wortley’s eyes ” notorious, and was at no pains to conceal his passion and, so to speak, proprietorship.

It is not strange if the lady’s head was turned for a while, and if she fell into a way of life that invited scandal. “ In general,” she writes to her sister, “ gallantry never was in so elevated a figure as it is at present. Twenty pretty fellows (the Duke of Wharton being president and chief director) have formed themselves into a committee of gallantry. They call themselves Schemers, and meet regularly three times a week to consult on gallant schemes for the advantage and advancement of that branch of happiness. . . . ’T is true they have the envy and curses of the old and ugly of both sexes, and a general persecution from all old women; but this is no more than all reformations must expect in their beginning.” The friendship of Wharton (“Poor W. . . . nipt in folly’s broadest bloom! ”) was not without its danger for the woman who accepted it, and there are other names that have become associated too closely with Lady Mary’s. She may have reckoned on this peril when she entered the lists of gallantry, but, though warned, she can scarcely have foreseen the true nature of the calamity before her from the other side of that life.

“ It was about the time of Cowley,” says Dr. Johnson, “ that wit, which had been till then used for Intellection, in contradiction to Will, took the meaning, whatever it be, which it now bears.” Dr. Johnson needed only to consult the career of his favorite Pope to have spoken more precisely; or, indeed, he might have quoted Pope’s explicit words: “ The life of a wit is a warfare upon earth.” And it was a war for hearth and gods; said Chesterfield one day in Parliament, giving at once a shrewd definition and an apt illustration: “ Wit, my Lords, is a sort of property — the property of those who have it, and too often the only property they have to depend on. It is indeed a precarious dependence. We, my Lords, thank God, have a dependence of another kind.” The game was simply to raise one’s self in estimation by rendering a rival, or, if need be, a friend, ridiculous or odious. Cleverness was the arms, vanity the motive. Personal satire was raised into the chief branch of literature, and the motto to all comers, Woe to the vanquished. Every feint of warfare was legitimate — so long as it was not made ignominious by detection. One of the commonest strategems, as old in practice as the days of Martial, but now employed scientifically, was to write a libelous poem and accuse another of being the author, whereby you killed two birds with one stone —

Vipereuraque vomat nostro sub nomine virus. The result is a literature which would be deprived of all human interest, were not envy and malice, like an inverted charity, one of the strongest and most binding of social instincts.

Now, the tragedy of Lady Mary’s life was just this, that, being a woman, and a beautiful woman of the world, she entered the lists and was beaten. Men could take their buffetings and continue in the fight. Mrs. Manley, too, might shock society and even suffer imprisonment for her libelous New Atlantis — she had no character to lose. Mrs. Astell might brave the world and the male “ puppies ” by her Essay in Defence of the Female Sex — she was never properly of the world. And, at a later date, Mrs. Montagu and the other blues might write and palaver to their heart’s content — they were careful not to enter into real competition with their sensitive lords; they belong to the distinctly female current of eighteenth-century life. But it was otherwise with Lady Mary. She took the field where her name was at stake, and having lost that, she lost all. She found that in this game the men, like the Abbé Galiani’s grand fripon là-haut, played with loaded dice. It may seem to us unjust, hard, absurd; it was the fact.

She herself knew the prejudice under which she fought. As early as 1710 she had written to her mentor, Dr. Burnet: “ There is hardly a character in the world more despicable, or more liable to universal ridicule, than that of a learned woman.” Nor was she without intimate knowledge of the tenderness of a woman’s name under scandal. There was, for instance, her neighbor, Mrs. Murray, who had been attacked by her footmen. — “ A very odd whim has entered the head of little Mrs. Murray,” writes our Lady; “ do you know she won’t visit me this winter? I, according to the usual integrity of my heart and simplicity of my manners, with great naïveté desired to explain with her on the subject, and she answered that she was convinced that I. had made the ballad upon her, and was resolved never to speak to me again.” It is an odd thing that so much of Lady Mary’s trouble should have arisen from poems she did not write. And as for this indecent ballad, whether she was guilty of it or not, she certainly stands credited with an “ Epistle from Arthur Grey, the Footman,” which might well bring a blush to the “ lovely nymph ” to whom it is so flatteringly addressed.

And of the more particular source of danger Lady Mary certainly received due warning. Addison had written to her: “ Leave Pope as soon as you can; he will certainly play you some devilish trick else;” but she preferred to dally with the fire. As to the causes of the quarrel, the new biography, unfortunately, leaves us as much at puzzle as we were before; the documents are still, and apparently will always be, wanting. According to the tradition preserved by Lady Louisa Stuart, Lady Mary’s own statement was “ that at some ill-chosen time, when she least expected what romances call a declaration, he made such passionate love to her, as, in spite of her utmost endeavors to be angry and look grave, provoked an immoderate fit of laughter; from which moment he became her implacable enemy” — naturally, and for the same reason that he raged at Colley Cibber’s infamous anecdote. But there is large room to doubt Lady Louisa’s story. It is notable, for one thing, that as early as 1722 Lady Mary “ very seldom ” saw “ Mr. Pope,” whereas the rupture did not occur until about 1727, when, it may be observed, she was in her thirty-ninth year. As a matter of fact Spence gives quite a different, and utterly trivial, explanation of the breach, which he professes to have had from Lady Mary. And as for Pope, his story is that “ he discontinued their society [that of Lady Mary and Lord Hervey] because he found they had too much wit for him ” — which, in a general way, sounds likest the truth. At least it tallies with the account of the matter that Pope repeated in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot:

More dupe than wit! No, that is too bad, Mr. Pope; let us take your manuscript version: —

Now, whether the scurrilous ballads on Pope, published by the Duke of Wharton or Sir William Yonge, were written before or after the quarrel, and whether, as Pope believed, Lady Mary had a finger in them, does not appear. It is at least suspicious that Lady Mary has again to deny her part in verses that might have disagreeable consequences. Certainly there is good evidence to show that she wrote part or all of the Verses to the Imitator of Horace, which came out in the full tide of the quarrel and incited Pope to retort with epigrams of almost incredible savageness. He fastened the name of Sappho upon her; he ruined her reputation for the time, and for the future.

One question raised by these incriminations can scarcely be passed over, delicate as it may seem. Was Lady Mary really the immoral creature he made her ? Now, in judging Pope we must remember always that he was, perhaps, the greatest writer of personal satire the world has ever known, and that he acquired his fame and his terrors not by striking at random, but by striking true. When Hervey, or Lady Mary, tried to injure him by comparing him with Horace: —

they might pain him by laughing at his humble origin and his crooked body, but to the world at large their physical satire would appear merely stupid and brutal, for the reason that in its moral and intellectual parts it was so palpably false. To call his numbers crabbed was to discredit their own taste; to speak of the hard heart of the author of Eloisa to Abelard was equally to discredit their own feelings. Who, in those days, had not dropped a tear to the concluding lines of that poem, addressed to Lady Mary herself when in the Orient: —

To such satire as Lady Mary’s Pope could say exultingly, “It is a pleasure and comfort at once to find that with so much mind as so much malice must have to accuse or blacken my character, it can fix on no one ill or immoral thing in my life.” He did not himself proceed in that way. He might, he undoubtedly did, exaggerate and distort, but he started with significant facts.

She had, though in all innocence it may be, allowed a certain Frenchman to address letters of gallantry to her, and had invested sums of money for him in the unfortunate South Sea Stock; Pope writes: —

Again, Mr. Wortley was notoriously avaricious, and his wife had early contracted something of his penuriousness; Pope writes: —

Again, Lady Mary’s sister fell into a melancholy, and, having been wrested from the care of Lord Grange, her husband’s brother, was kept in confinement by Lady Mary; Pope writes: —

Again, Lady Mary grew with years into slovenly habits; Pope writes: —

All this cunning in satire makes it hard to believe that there was not some basis for the more licentious lines, which need not be here quoted. And the common opinion of the day confirms such a view. Thus, one is not surprised to find the mild Mrs. Montagu, in one of her letters, alluding to the scandal of Lady Mary’s life as a thing well known, or to see her mentioned casually in one of Chesterfield’s Characters as “ eminent for her parts and her vices.” Lord Chesterfield was no common scandal-monger; he measured his words, and I confess that this chance phrase of his has had great weight in forming my judgment. Possibly her reputation was merely the result of Pope’s satire. Now satire, however based on facts, has never scrupled to add its own superstructure, and we may close this discussion, already too long, by saying that the lady was indiscreet. Even her latest panegyrist, Miss Symonds, grants as much as that.

The upshot of it was that in July of 1739, at the age of fifty, Lady Mary left her home and her family and set out for her long, lonely sojourn in Italy and France. No special quarrel with her husband has been unearthed, and she continued to write to him letters full of respect; they had apparently just drifted apart. Her daughter was married; her son was totally estranged from her. England had been made uncomfortable, and, when opportunity offered, she took herself out of the way. Her correspondence during these years of exile is full of interesting details, and pages might be made up of extracts on a variety of topics. It is not, in my judgment, as entertaining as the letters from the Orient, and it indicates, also, I think, a certain letting down of her character. The fact is, her career shows a slow and steady degeneration from the frank, fondly-wise girlhood which Miss Symonds has thrown into pleasant and artistic relief. More especially, her war with the wits had hardened and coarsened her mind. It is not easy, for instance, to forgive the complete lack of feeling she displays toward her son, however worthless and wild he may have been. It is not pretty to begin a letter, as she does one to her husband from Genoa, “ I am sorry to trouble you on so disagreeable a subject as Our son; ” and she rarely mentions his name without some rancorous remark. The best that can be said is that her language is no more outrageous than that used by Queen Caroline in regard to her graceless son, the Prince of Wales.

On the death of her husband, in 1761, she returned to England to settle up his affairs; he left, it was estimated, £800,000 in money, and £17,000 per annum in land, mines, etc.; an enormous fortune for those days. She took a small furnished “ harpsichord ” house in Great George Street, and there for a while was the wonder of London. Walpole’s account of his visit to her is one of the bestknown morceaux in his Correspondence 舒 a strange and terrible pendant to his portrait of her as he had seen her in Florence twenty-two years earlier: - “ Lady Mary Wortley is arrived; I have seen her; I think her avarice, her dirt, and her vivacity, are all increased. Her dress, like her language, is a galimatias of several countries; the groundwork, rags, and the embroidery, nastiness. She wears no cap, no handkerchief, no gown, no petticoat, no shoes. An old black-laced hood represents the first, the fur of a horseman’s coat, which replaces the third, serves for the second; a dimity petticoat is deputy, and officiates for the fourth; and slippers act the part of the last. When I was at Florence, and she was expected there, we were drawing Sortes Virgilianas — for her, we literally drew

It would have been a stronger prophecy now, even than it was then.”

Again, and for the last time, Lady Mary suffered from the impertinence of masculine wit, and what a change from the picture of the young girl toasted at the Kit-Cat Club! We may believe that her latest enemy drew freely upon his imagination.

She died August 21, 1762, leaving, as Walpole wrote, “ twenty-one large volumes in prose and verse, in manuscript.” The story of how her letters got into print is one of the puzzles of literary annals, but is not within our range.