rd Hervey. Certainly he lampooned
the Duke, and he was never weary of writing insultingly about the other.

Most probable is the account given by Lady Louisa Stuart, Lady Mary's
grand-daughter, which is to the effect that Pope made a declaration of
love, and that Lady Mary received it with shrieks of laughter. If Pope
were serious, it must have galled him indeed, though nothing can excuse
the malignity with which he pursued her for years and years. And if he
were not in earnest, he would probably have been nearly, if not quite,
as indignant.

Anyhow, it is a sorry story, and a blot on the scutcheon of the poet,
who, good-hearted as he usually was, was cursed by the gift, refined to
a rare degree, of alienating his friends, more often than not for some
fancied slight. Addison he lampooned, and from Dennis and Philips he
parted company. "Leave him as soon as you can," Addison had warned Lady
Mary. "He will certainly play you some devilish trick else: he has an
appetite for satire." Lady Mary presently must have wished that she had
followed this sage counsel.

When Pope fought, he fought with the gloves off; and not the sex or the
age or the standing of the subject of his wrath deterred him a whit.

"Have I, in silent wonder, seen such things
As pride in slaves, and avarice in kings;
And at a peer, or peeress, shall I fret,
Who starves a sister, or forswears a debt?"

Thus Pope in the First Dialogue of the _Epilogue to the Satires._ The
reference to forswearing a debt, is, of course, to the Remond business;
"who starves a sister" is an allusion to Lady Mary and Lady Mar.[6]

[Footnote 6: _See_ p. 200 of this work.]

Pope returned to the attack again and again. In _The Satires of Dr. John
Donne Versified_, he inserted the following lines, although there is
nothing in the original to warrant the stroke at Lady Mary:

"Yes, thank my stars! as early as I knew
This town, I had the sense to hate it too:
Yet here, as e'en in hell, there must be still
One giant vice, so excellently ill.
That all beside, one pities, not abhors:
As who knows Sappho, smiles at other whores."

Again, in the _Epistle to Martha Blount_:

"As Sappho's diamonds with her dirty smock;
Or Sappho at her toilet's greasy task,
With Sappho radiant at an evening mask."

Pope would not admit that he alluded to Lady Mary as Sappho, but
everyone realised that this was so. Lady Mary, much distressed, begged
Lord Pet