Lady Mary Wortley Montague Part 14

So the struck deer in some sequestrate part Lies down to die, the arrow at his heart; There, stretch'd unseen in coverts hid from day, Bleeds drop by drop, and pants his life away.'

It may here be remarked that in Epistle VIII of the _Moral Essays_ Pope had a line:

"And other beauties envy Wortley's eyes";

but in a reprint of the poem he subst.i.tuted [Lady] "Worsley" for "Wortley" in order to give the impression that "Wortley" had been a misprint.

Pope's quarrel with Lady Mary began in or about 1722. The cause is obscure. Many reasons have been advanced. Lady Mary in her correspondence gives no clue as to the breach.

It has been said that it arose out of the fact that Pope lent the Montagus a pair of sheets and that they were returned unwashed, to the great indignation of his mother who lived with him. It is difficult to believe this.

Others have it that he was jealous of the favour which Lady Mary accorded to the Duke of Wharton and Lord 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 appet.i.te 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 s.e.x 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 h.e.l.l, there must be still One giant vice, so excellently ill.

That all beside, one pities, not abhors: As who knows Sappho, smiles at other wh.o.r.es."

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 Peterborough to urge Pope to refrain. The mission was undertaken reluctantly, and the result was scarcely satisfactory. "He said to me,"

Lord Peterborough wrote to Lady Mary, "what I had taken the liberty of saying to you, that he wondered how the town would apply these lines to any but some noted common woman; that he would yet be more surprised if you should take them to yourself; he named to me four remarkable poetesses and scribblers, Mrs. Centlivre, Mrs. Heywood, Mrs. Manley, and Mrs. Behn, a.s.suring me that such only were the objects of his satire."

Much upset, Lady Mary wrote the following letter to Arbuthnot:

January 3 [1735].

"Sir,

"I have perused the last lampoon of your ingenious friend, and am not surprised you did not find me out under the name of Sappho, because there is nothing I ever heard in our characters or circ.u.mstances to make a parallel, but as the town (except you, who know better) generally suppose Pope means me, whenever he mentions that name, I cannot help taking notice of the horrible malice he bears against the lady signified by that name, which appears to be irritated by supposing her writer of the Verses to the Imitator of Horace. Now I can a.s.sure him they were wrote (without my knowledge) by a gentleman of great merit, whom I very much esteem, who he will never guess, and who, if he did know, he durst not attack; but I own the design was so well meant, and so excellently executed, that I cannot be sorry they were written. I wish you would advise poor Pope to turn to some more honest livelihood than libelling; I know he will allege in his excuse that he must write to eat, and he has now grown sensible that n.o.body will buy his verses except their curiosity is piqued to it, to see what is said of their acquaintance; but I think this method of gain so exceeding vile that it admits of no excuse at all.--Can anything be more detestable than his abusing poor Moore, scarce cold in his grave, when it is plain he kept back his poem, while he lived, for fear he should beat him for it? This is shocking to me, though of a man I never spoke to and hardly knew by sight; but I am seriously concerned at the worse scandal he has heaped on Mr. Congreve, who was my friend, and whom I am obliged to justify, because I can do it on my own knowledge, and, which is yet farther bring witness of it, from those who were then often with me that he was so far from loving Pope's rhyme, both that--and his conversation were perpetual jokes to him, exceeding despicable in his opinion, and he has often made us laugh in talking of them, being particularly pleasant on that subject. As to Pope's being born of honest parents, I verily believe it, and will add one praise to his mother's character, that (though I only knew her very old) she always appeared to me to have much better sense than himself. I desire, sir, as a favour, that you would show this letter to Pope, and you will very much oblige, sir,

"Your humble servant."

Lady Mary was not a person, after severe chastis.e.m.e.nt, to turn the other cheek, and Pope was well aware of it. He believed that more than one social satire upon him came from her pen; and he especially suspected her of having written, or anyhow of having had a hand in the composition of _A Pop upon Pope_, in which an account was given of a whipping in Ham Walk which was said to have been administered to him. The poet was so furious--he regarded it as an indirect attack on his physical deformity, of which he was always so conscious--that he actually inserted an announcement in the papers that no such incident had ever occurred-- thereby drawing yet more attention to the lampoon. "You may be certain I shall never reply to such a libel as Lady Mary's," he wrote to Fortescue. "It is a pleasure and comfort at once to find out that with so much mind as so much malice must have to accuse or blacken my character, it can fix upon no one ill or immoral thing in my life and must content itself to say, my poetry is dull and my person ugly."

Lady Mary, in a letter to Arbuthnot, denied the authors.h.i.+p of _A Pop upon Pope_:

"Sir,

"Since I saw you I have made some inquiries, and heard more, of the story you was so kind to mention to me. I am told Pope has had the surprising impudence to a.s.sert he can bring the lampoon when he pleases to produce it, under my own hand; I desire he may be made to keep to this offer. If he is so skilful in counterfeiting hands, I suppose he will not confine that great talent to the gratifying his malice, but take some occasion to increase his fortune by the same method, and I may hope (by such practices) to see him exalted according to his merit, which n.o.body will rejoice at more than myself. I beg of you, sir (as an act of justice), to endeavour to set the truth in an open light, and then I leave to your judgment the character of those who have attempted to hurt mine in so barbarous a manner. I can a.s.sure you (in particular) you named a lady to me (as abused in this libel) whose name I never heard before, and as I never had any acquaintance with Dr. Swift am an utter stranger to all his affairs and even his person, which I never saw to my knowledge, and am now convinced the whole is a contrivance of Pope's to blast the reputation of one who never injured him. I am not more sensible of his injustice, than I am, sir, of your [_sic_] candour, generosity, and good sense I have found in you, which has obliged me to be with a very uncommon warmth your real friend, and I heartily wish for an opportunity of showing I am so more effectually than by subscribing myself your very

"Humble servant."

Whether, in spite of her denial, Lady Mary had a hand in _A Pop upon Pope_ cannot be said; but it is certainly safe to believe that the following lines were written by her, in conjunction, the gossip of the day had it, with Lord Hervey, with some a.s.sistance from Mr. Wyndham, then tutor to the Duke of c.u.mberland:

"VERSES ADDRESSED TO THE IMITATOR OF THE FIRST SATIRE OF THE SECOND BOOK OF HORACE.

_By a Lady_

"Nor thou the justice of the world disown.

That leaves thee thus an outcast and alone: For though in law the murder be to kill, In equity the murder is the will.

Then while with coward hand you stab a name, And try at least to a.s.sa.s.sinate our fame, Like the first bold a.s.sa.s.sin be thy lot, Ne'er be thy guilt forgiven or forgot; But as thou hat'st by hatred by mankind, And with the emblem of thy crooked mind Marked on thy back, like Cain, by G.o.d's own hand, Wander like him accursed through the land."

It was this malignant attack upon his person that inspired Pope's lines in the _Epistle to Arbuthnot_:

"Once, and but once, his heedless youth was bit, And liked that dangerous thing, a female wit.

Safe, so he thought, though all the prudent chid; He writ no libels, but my lady did; Great odds, in amorous or poetic game, Where woman's is the sin, and man's the shame."

With the following extract from a letter written by Lady Mary from Florence in 1740 this unpleasing incident may be dismissed:

"The word malignity, and a pa.s.sage in your letter, call to my mind the wicked wasp of Twickenham: his lies affect me now no more; they will be all as much despised as the story of the seraglio and the handkerchief, of which I am persuaded he was the only inventor. That man has a malignant and ungenerous heart; and he is base enough to a.s.sume the mask of a moralist, in order to decry human nature, and to give a decent vent to his hatred of man and woman kind.--But I must quit this contemptible subject, on which a just indignation would render my pen so fertile, that after having fatigued you with a long letter, I would surfeit you with a supplement twice as long."

At Twickenham Lady Mary interested herself in planning alterations in the house and gardens. "There is a sort of pleasure," she said, "in shewing one's own fancy on one's own ground." The longer she stayed at the riverside, the better she liked it. "I am at present at Twickenham,"

she wrote in July, 1723, "which is become so fas.h.i.+onable, and the neighbourhood so much enlarged, that 'tis more like Tunbridge or the Bath than a country retreat."

"I am now at the same distance from London that you are from Paris, and could fall into solitary amus.e.m.e.nts with a good deal of taste; but I resist it, as a temptation of Satan, and rather turn my endeavours to make the world as agreeable to me as I can, which is the true philosophy; that of despising it is of no use but to hasten wrinkles"

(she wrote to Lady Mar in 1725). "I ride a good deal, and have got a horse superior to any two-legged animal, he being without a fault. I work like an angel. I receive visits upon idle days, and I shade my life as I do my tent-st.i.tch, that is, make as easy transitions as I can from business to pleasure; the one would be too flaring and gaudy without some dark shades of t'other; and if I worked altogether in the grave colours, you know 'twould be quite dismal. Miss Skerritt is in the house with, me, and Lady Stafford has taken a lodging at Richmond: as their ages are different, and both agreeable in their kind, I laugh with the one, or reason with the other, as I happen to be in a gay or serious humour; and I manage my friends with such a strong yet with a gentle hand, that they are both willing to do whatever I have a mind to."

"Molly," that is, Maria Skerritt or Skirrett, is best known for her connection with Sir Robert Walpole. There was nothing clandestine about the relations.h.i.+p: it was openly avowed. Miss Skerritt, who was the daughter of a London merchant, had great good looks and an ample fortune, and Walpole declared that she was indispensable to his happiness. She was received everywhere, and moved in fas.h.i.+onable society. It was to Lady Walpole and Molly Skerritt that Gay alluded in the song that he put in the mouth of Macheath (who was meant for Robert Walpole):

"How happy could I be with either, Were t'other dear Charmer away!"

Lady Walpole survived until the summer of 1738, and after her death the others married. The second Lady Walpole died of a miscarriage in June, 1739, to the great and enduring sorrow of her husband. For the surviving child, Walpole, when he accepted a peerage in 1742, secured the rank of an earl's daughter.

Lady Mary now spent her time between London and Twickenham. At Court, she was as popular as ever with the King; and she was liked in literary circles, and on good terms with Young, Arbuthnot, Garth, and the rest of the set. "I see every body but converse with n.o.body but _des amies choisses_; in the first rank of these are Lady Stafford and dear Molly Skerritt, both of whom have now the additional merit of being old acquaintances, and never having given me any reason to complain of either of 'em. I pa.s.s some days with the d.u.c.h.ess of Montagu, who might be a reigning beauty if she pleased. I see the whole town every Sunday, and select a few that I retain to supper. In short, if life could be always what it is, I believe I have so much humility in my temper I could be contented without anything better than this two or three hundred years but, alas!