one of her letters
in 1737, in which she had complained that she was too old to inspire
passion, after paying a compliment to her charms more gallant than
decorous, said: "I should think anybody a great fool that said he liked
spring better than summer merely because it is further from autumn, or
that they loved green fruit better than ripe only because it was further
from being rotten. I ever did, and believe ever shall, like women best--

"Just in the noon of life--those golden days,
When the mind ripens as the form decays."

Lady Mary was then in her forty-ninth year, being six years Hervey's
senior.

Lady Louisa Stuart, writing in 1837--that is, seventy-five years after
the death of her grandmother, Lady Mary--wrote indignantly of the
attacks that had been made upon her ancestress. "The multitude of
stories circulated about her--as about all people who were objects of
note in their day--increase, instead of lessening, the difficulty," she
said. "Some of these may be confidently pronounced inventions, simple
and purely false; some, if true, concerned a different person; some were
grounded upon egregious blunders; and not a few upon jests, mistaken by
the dull and literal for earnest. Others, again, where a little truth
and a great deal of falsehood were probably intermingled, nobody now
living can pretend to confirm, or contradict, or unravel. Nothing is so
readily believed, yet nothing is usually so unworthy of credit, as tales
learned from report, or caught up in casual conversation. A circumstance
carelessly told, carelessly listened to, half comprehended, and
imperfectly remembered, has a poor chance of being repeated accurately
by the first hearer; but when, after passing through the moulding of
countless hands, it comes, with time, place, and person, gloriously
confounded, into those of a bookmaker ignorant of all its bearings, it
will be lucky indeed if any trace of the original groundwork remains
distinguishable."

Lady Mary's most redoubtable assailants were Pope and Horace Walpole,
and both were biassed. The story of Pope's quarrel with her is told in
the following pages. Walpole, it has been suggested, disliked her much
because she had championed his father's mistress, Molly Skerritt,
against the mother to whom he was devoted. Pope, of course, knew her
well; but Walpole, who was twenty-eight years her junior, only met her
in her late middle age. Walpole's prejudice was so great what when Lady
Mar