What then was the cause of a quarrel so desperately fought? Mr. Dilke and Mr. Moy Thomas, who belong to a school of criticism essentially sceptical and destructive, are inclined to believe that it was of an extremely unheroic nature. Mr. Thomas, in the careful biographical notice prefixed to his excellent edition of Lady M. W. Montagu's works, attributes the estrangement partly to growing political differences, partly to literary pique; while Mr. Dilke relies on the account of Miss Hawkins and Worsdale the painter, "that the first cause of quarrel between her (Lady Mary) and Pope was her borrowing a pair of sheets from the poet, which, after keeping them a fortnight, were returned to him unwashed."1 This incident may of course have led to a coolness, and the considerations specified by Mr. Thomas may have been weighty enough to procure Lady Mary a place in the Dunciad; but we can hardly believe that such circumstances, even with the supposed fresh offence given in the "libels" to which Pope refers in his Epistle to Arbuthnot, would have been sufficient in themselves to inspire the savage attack made upon Sappho in this Imitation. Besides, such secondary evidence as Miss Hawkins and Worsdale can give, is hardly to be set against the direct statement on the subject, which comes down to us, on the highest authority, from Lady Mary herself. The story which she told to her own daughter, the Countess of Bute, who repeated it to her daughter, Lady Louisa Stuart, 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 endeavours to be angry and look grave, provoked an immoderate fit of laughter; from which moment he became her implacable enemy." (Lady M. W. Montagu's Works, vol. i. p. 92.)

This story is perfectly consistent with the tone of Pope's letters to Lady Mary, and with his expression in the Epistle to Arbuthnot, Sappho can tell you how this man was bit." Nor is it absolutely inconsistent with what Lady Mary on another occasion told Spence; or with Pope's own account of the rupture in his Letter to a Noble Lord. Spence reports Lady Mary thus:

"I got a common friend to ask Mr. Pope why he had left off visiting me? He answered negligently that he went as often as he used to do. I then got Dr. Arbuthnot to ask him what Lady Mary had done to him? He said that Lady Mary and Lord Hervey had pressed him once together (and I don't remember that we were ever together with him in our lives) to write a satire on some certain persons, that he refused it, and that this had occasioned the breach between us." (Anecdotes, p. 235.)

Pope, on the other hand, says, in his Letter to the Noble Lord, that he had "discontinued their society (that of Lady Mary and Lord

1 Papers of a Critic, p. 352.

Hervey) because he found they had too much wit for him." Now, Lady Mary's story to Spence is just what we should expect from a clever woman, questioned upon a delicate subject; her answer is quite insufficient to account for facts, but quite good enough to put off the inconvenient curiosity of an amiable gossip. And Pope's account of his reasons or discontinuing Lady Mary's acquaintance, though scanty and ambiguous, is by no means out of keeping with the "immoderate fit of laughter" with which she says she received his "declaration." It will be observed too that both in his Letter to the Noble Lord and in the Epistle to Arbuthnot he speaks of the effects of Lady Mary's "wit" in the one place he says he discontinued her acquaintance" because she had too much wit for him," in the other he confesses that "he liked that dangerous thing, a female wit." Indeed, if we consider the characters of both parties in connection with the recorded facts, it will be seen that a collision between two such natures was from the first inevitable. Pope was in every sense of the word an idealist: he viewed himself and all things about him through an atmosphere of imagination; and he was at the same time keenly alive to ridicule. Lady Mary, on the other hand, was utterly deficient in imagination; sharp, clear, and brilliant wit, and shrewd common sense, characterise all her writings; whether she is corresponding with Pope or Lord Hervey, she always insists on reducing their fancies and sensibilities to plain matter of fact. She penetrates the motives of Lord Hervey's sentimental longings for retirement at Ickworth; she translates into prosaic verse Pope's raptures over his two lovers killed in a thunderstorm. It might have been prophesied that, either in his poetry or his person, Pope would receive mortal offence from a critic of such unsparing wit.

The stroke, when it came, was delivered on the most sensitive part of the poet's nature. It is quite unnecessary to suppose that he was passionately in love with Lady Mary. The " declarations" which he is constantly making to her in his letters, he made, with as much sincerity, and almost in identical words, to Judith Cowper and Martha Blount; and, in using language of this kind, he was only conforming with the gallantry fashionable in his age. He calls himself in one of his poems the "most thinking rake alive." His love-making was like his description of Stanton-Harcourt, purely ideal. But his vanity and his artistic sensibility were so strong that he was vexed when he was not believed to be in earnest. To have the declaration of his elaborate passion received with laughter, must have been a rude shock to his vanity, and his acute self-consciousness would have no doubt associated Lady Mary's behaviour with his own physical defects. After all his well-considered expressions of devotion, after the exquisite lines in which he had connected her name with his grotto, ridicule was the refinement of torture. It humiliated him in his own esteem, and

the recollection of the light mockery, with which she had always met his heroics, added to his sense of insult and injury.

These considerations, though they help us to understand the condition of Pope's feelings, afford no excuse whatever for the character of his satire on Lady Mary. The rupture between them was produced by merely personal circumstances; but the satire with which the poet retaliated was public. It is not true, as Pope says in his MS., that "he writ no libels, but my Lady did": the first libel came undoubtedly from his side in the reference to the "hapless Monsieur" in the Dunciad. We indeed see from the Memoirs of Grub Street, that Pope believed Lady Mary to have had a hand in the One Epistle, and to have written A Pop upon Pope; but gross as are the personalities in these wretched productions, still even if Lady Mary had aided in their composition, of which there is no proof, such savage retaliation as the lines upon Sappho would have been unpardonable.

Pope was equally the aggressor in his quarrel with Lord Hervey. He pretends indeed to innocence, but his expressions in his Letter to a Noble Lord are plainly ironical. "I never heard," he says, "of the least displeasure you had conceived against me, till I was told an imitation I had made of Horace had offended some persons, and among them, your Lordship. I could not have apprehended that a few general strokes about a Lord scribbling carelessly, a Pimp, or a Spy at Court, a Sharper in a gilded chariot, that these I say should ever be applied as they have been by any malice but that which is the greatest in the world, the malice of ill people to themselves." This is certainly not meant for a sincere disavowal of offence; on the contrary, the writer means to be doubly offensive by calling attention, under the veil of what he calls "general strokes," to his particular and pointed references to Lord Hervey.

There can be little doubt that the familiarity between Lord Hervey and Lady Mary was the main cause of Pope's displeasure. He gave the first proofs of his dislike by placing Lord Hervey among the authors initialled in the Bathos, and he immediately afterwards impaled him in the first edition of the Dunciad.

And high-born Howard, more majestic sire,

Impatient waits till ** [Hervey] joins the choir.

The attack culminated in the reference to "Lord Fanny" in the first Imitation of Horace; and after three such deliberate blows it certainly seems a somewhat bold assertion on Pope's part that "Peace was his dear delight." At the same time it must be remembered that, on each occasion, Lord Hervey was attacked only in his literary capacity, which was of course fairly open to public criticism. After the third attack Lord Hervey at last rejoined. Whether he was the sole or the joint author of the Verses to the Imitator of Horace is

doubtful. Mr. Croker found at Ickworth a MS. copy of the verses prepared for a second edition, with MS. notes by the author, without any mention of the "Lady" on the title page. We have also Lady Mary's denial of the authorship in the letter to Arbuthnot. On the other hand the lines are included in a volume of MSS. vouched to by her as her own compositions, and they are much smoother and more polished than most of Lord Hervey's poetical pieces. But the latter had certainly a hand in the verses; the Epistle to the Doctor of Divinity was all his own; and no one can say that the provocation which he had received was sufficient to justify the brutal personality of his retort. After such treatment Pope might fairly claim to have written the character of Sporus in self-defence, nor need we waste much sympathy on Lord Hervey for the injuries he received in the fray. Pope is unjust in his estimate of his victim's intellect; Lord Hervey's Memoirs show that he possessed high statesmanlike qualities, prudence, penetration, and judgment; but they equally show that the character of Sporus was no libel on his heart; all his observations on individuals are made in a spirit of bitter detraction, and his cynical view of human nature is unrelieved by a generous sentiment. His style affords perpetual examples of the correctness of Pope's description of it as "one vile antithesis."

་

As to the satire on Delia and Judge Page, Mr. Croker says: "Delia was Mary Howard of the Berkshire branch, widow in 1730 of Henry first Earl of Deloraine, and now wife of William Wyndham, Esq., sub-Governor to the young Duke of Cumberland. She herself was governess to the young Princesses. I have not been able to discover the cause of Pope's animosity against Lady Deloraine; it is probable that as she was very silly and imprudent in her talk she may, 'at some unlucky time,' have said something to offend her irritable neighbour. Lord Hervey's Memoirs have brought this lady into more prominent view as a mistress of George II., but her character as exhibited by him is as remote as possible from such dark passions as Pope imputes to her. Her Ladyship,' he says, 'was one of the vainest as well as one of the simplest women that ever lived, but to this wretched head there was certainly joined one of the prettiest faces that was ever formed' (Memoirs, ii. 351). I have found in the Hervey Papers an anecdote that may have given rise to the slander about Miss Mackenzie. This young lady of the Seaforth family was one of the maids of honour, and it happened one day that Lady Deloraine addressed her so rudely that she left the dinner table in tears. This incident may have been so exaggerated as to have given rise to the imputation of poison, for I find in a letter to Lord Bristol in 1738, in allusion to the rivalry between the two Royal Mistresses, Lady Yarmouth and Lady Deloraine, he hints that one might possibly get rid of the other by poison, as one of them was

shrewdly suspected of doing by the fair Mackenzie,' but this allusion of the good old Earl is no authority, for it is dated five years after Pope had given circulation to the story; but on looking a little closer into the matter, we do not find that Pope positively says that Miss Mackenzie died of the poison. Mr. Bowles indeed does, both in the note to this passage, and in his Life, but he gives no authority, and I have ascertained beyond all doubt that Lady Deloraine continued in the family of the young princesses till she was appointed Maid of Honour to the Queen, which latter post she resigned in February, 1733, the very month of the publication of Pope's Satires, on her marriage with N. Price, Esq., of Saintfield, in the County of Down. The poisoning therefore could, even in Pope's malicious view, have been no more than a calumny, to which perhaps the scene at the dinner table may have given rise.

"With regard to Sir Francis Page, Pope's enmity would be sufficiently explained, if the statement in Chalmers' Biographical Dictionary were true, that Judge Fortescue Aland, dismissed at the accession of George II., was Pope's friend Fortescue, the interlocutor in this dialogue. But Chalmers was mistaken. Judge Fortescue Aland's name was John, and he was afterwards an Irish peer. Pope's friend was William, Master of the Rolls in 1741. Sir Francis Page, a judge of the Common Pleas, was probably indebted for the bad immortality conferred on him in this celebrated line, and in one or two other passages in Pope's Works (Epilogue to Satires, ii. 189; Dunciad, iv. 30) to his having in 1728 presided at the trial of Pope's unworthy protégé Savage, for the murder of Mr. Sinclair. Savage, no doubt, gave Pope the same angry and exaggerated account of the Judge's deportment, which he afterwards gave to Dr. Johnson. But Johnson, while he produces Savage's representation or misrepresentation of Page's usual insolence and severity, honestly discriminates it from the Judge's charge to the jury, which he gives nearly in the words of the contemporary report of the trial, and which seems temperate and proper, while it is evident that Savage's behaviour at the bar was exceedingly disrespectful and violent. Fielding also, in Tom Jones (Book viii., 2), describes Page still more dramatically, and no less unfavourably, but as Pope's Satire and Johnson's Life of Savage had already popularised the ill-character of Page, its adoption by the novelist is no evidence of its truth."

This Imitation was registered at Stationers' Hall, Feb. 14, 1732-3, under the title "The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated in Dialogue between Alex. Pope of Twickenham in Com : Midd: Esqr., on the one part, and his learned Councel on the other;" the owner of the copyright being Lawton Gilliver.