She swift detects amid their dark retreats;
(Horrid as Cacus in their thievish dens)
Regains the trophies, bears in triumph back
The pilfer’d glories to a wond’ring world.
So Stella boasts, from her the tale I learned;
With pride she told it, I with rapture heard.
Mrs. Yearsley was not loath to address the great in verse. Mr. Raikes of Manchester, the founder of Sunday Schools, the Duchess of Portland, and the Author of The Castle of Otranto (genially referred to as ‘the Honourable H—e W—e’) were all commemorated. Their influential patronage and sad Lactilla’s melancholy tale made the volume immediately successful, and it passed into a fourth edition in 1786.
Lactilla might, however, have been happier had she been less successful. There had come to her, after the publication of her book, the not inconsiderable sum of three hundred and fifty pounds, which Hannah More held in trust for her. One is not surprised to learn that Miss More was cautious in paying out this money to Mrs. Yearsley, nor that this caution impressed the owner of the money as mere niggardliness. A sharp quarrel ensued which was fully set forth by both women, by Hannah More in her letters to Mrs. Montagu and by the poetess in the preface to her next volume of verses. It cost the poor milk-woman all her fine friends and the fine reputation which they had blown up for her. She sank gradually from view, and when she died, in 1806, was probably as obscure as when she was ‘discovered’ some twenty years before. Had she been of a philosophical temperament, she might perhaps have extracted some comfort from the cynical reflection that her fall had been well-nigh as humiliating to her discoverers and patrons as to herself. Walpole continued for months to chuckle over the collapse of her reputation, asserting that, if wise, she would now put gin in her milk and kill herself by way of attaining to an immortality like Chatterton’s;[402] but the bluestockings were glad to forget the poor creature and the mischief they had done her, and the pathos of her latter state moved them only to passionate descriptions of her ingratitude.