First of all Englishwomen, she had her son inoculated for the small-pox; this method of prevention being practised at that time in portions of Turkey. Succeeding in this, she brought the method, and strong advocacy of it, back to England with her. It was a bold thing to do, and she always loved boldnesses. It was a humane thing to do, and her humanities were always active. The medical professors looked doubtingly upon it; even the clergy preached against it as contravening the intentions of Providence—just as some zealots, fifty years ago, declared against the employment of chloroform and other anæsthetics. But Lady Mary succeeded in her endeavors, and inoculation became shortly after an approved and adopted practice.
On the return from the Turkish embassy Mr. Montagu, perhaps at the instance of Pope, bought a home for her at Twickenham, a delightful suburb of London, where the poet was then residing, and at the zenith of his fame. His poetic worship at her shrine was renewed with all the old ardor. He gave Sir Godfrey Kneller a commission to paint her portrait in Turkish dress, with which she had done great execution at court balls.
"The picture," says Pope, in a letter to her, "dwells really at my heart, and I have made a perfect passion of preferring your present face to your past."
What the past had been we may infer from this bit of verse, written while she was in the East:
"In vain my structures rise, my gardens grow,
In vain fair Thames reflects the double scenes
Of hanging mountains and of sloping greens.
Joy dwells not there; to happier seats it flies,
And only dwells where Wortley casts her eyes.
What are the gay parterre and checkered shade,
The morning bower, the evening colonnade,
But soft recesses of uneasy minds
To sigh unheard into the passing winds;
So the struck deer in some sequestered part
Lies down to die, the arrow at his heart;
There, stretched unseen, in coverts hid from day
Bleeds drop by drop and pants his life away."
But this worship is not for very long; there comes a quarrel, which is so sharp and bitter, and with such echoes in ode or satire, as to become the scandal of the neighborhood.
What brought it about cannot be so distinctly told. Lady Mary persisted in saying that the crippled sensitive poet had forgotten himself to so impudent an avowal of love that she had repelled him with a shout of laughter, and so turned his heart into gall.
That his heart was all gall toward her thereafter there needed no proof beyond his stinging couplets; and though he denied her tale with unction, he never told a story of his own in respect to this affair which made her character seem the worse, or his the better.
In an evil hour her ladyship (who had written verse already, which for her fame's sake it were better she had never written), undertook, with the aid of her friend Lord Hervey, to reply to the lampoons of Pope. Thereupon the shrinking, keen-smarting poet made other burning verses, by which the Hervey and the Montagu were both put to the torture. It must have been uncomfortable weather for her ladyship at Twickenham in those days. True, Hervey, Peterborough, Bolingbroke, and many of the courtiers were at her service; and she was a favorite of George I.—so far as any respectable woman could be called a favorite of that gross creature; but Pope's shafts of ridicule had a feather of grace about them that carried them straight and far. Mr. Montagu himself was a husband who loved London and his coal-fields without her ladyship, rather better than Twickenham gardens with her ladyship.