there can be no doubt that Pope
intended his abuse to reach its mark. Sappho was an obvious name for the
most famous of poetic ladies. Pope himself, in one of his last letters
to her, says that fragments of her writing would please him like
fragments of Sappho's; and their mediator, Peterborough, writes of her
under the same name in some complimentary and once well-known verses to
Mrs. Howard. Pope had himself alluded to her as Sappho in some verses
addressed (about 1722) to another lady, Judith Cowper, afterwards Mrs.
Madan, who was for a time the object of some of his artificial
gallantry. The only thing that can be said is that his abuse was a
sheer piece of Billingsgate, too devoid of plausibility to be more than
an expression of virulent hatred. He was like a dirty boy who throws mud
from an ambush, and declares that he did not see the victim
bespattered.[11]

A bitter and humiliating quarrel followed. Lord Hervey, who had been
described as "Lord Fanny," in the same satire, joined with his friend,
Lady Mary, in writing lampoons upon Pope. The best known was a copy of
verses, chiefly, if not exclusively by Lady Mary, in which Pope is
brutally taunted with the personal deformities of his "wretched little
carcass," which, it seems, are the only cause of his being "unwhipt,
unblanketed, unkicked." One verse seems to have stung him more deeply,
which says that his "crabbed numbers" are

Hard as his heart and as his birth obscure.

To this and other assaults Pope replied by a long letter, suppressed,
however, for the time, which, as Johnson says, exhibits to later readers
"nothing but tedious malignity," and is, in fact, a careful raking
together of everything likely to give pain to his victim. It was not
published till 1751, when both Pope and Hervey were dead. In his later
writings he made references to Sappho, which fixed the name upon her,
and amongst other pleasant insinuations, speaks of a weakness which she
shared with Dr. Johnson,--an inadequate appreciation of clean linen.
More malignant accusations are implied both in his acknowledged and
anonymous writings. The most ferocious of all his assaults, however, is
the character of Sporus, that is Lord Hervey, in the epistle to
Arbuthnot, where he seems to be actually screaming with malignant fury.
He returns the taunts as to effeminacy, and calls his adversary a "mere
white curd of asses' milk,"--an innocent drink, which he was himself in
the habit of consu