Once, and but once, his heedless youth was bit,
And liked that dangerous thing, a female wit.
Safe as he thought, though all the prudent chid,
He wrote no libels, but my lady did;
Great odds in amorous or poetic game,
Where woman's is the sin, and man's the shame!
The result was a deadly and interminable feud. Lady Mary might possibly have inflicted the first private offence, but Pope gave the first public affront. A man who, under such circumstances, could grossly satirize a female, would, in a less civilized state of society, have revenged himself with a blow. The brutality and cowardice were the same.
The war of words did not, however, proceed at once to such extremity; the first indication of Pope's revolt from his sworn allegiance, and a conscious hint of the secret cause, may be found in some lines addressed to a lady poetess,[136] to whom he pays a compliment at Lady Mary's expense.
Though sprightly Sappho force our love and praise,
A softer wonder my pleased soul surveys,—
The mild Erinna blushing in her bays;
So while the sun's broad beam yet strikes the sight,
All mild appears the moon's more sober light.
Serene in virgin majesty she shines,
And unobserved, the glaring orb declines.
Soon after appeared that ribald and ruffian-like attack on her in the satires. She sent Lord Peterborough to remonstrate with Pope, to whom he denied the intended application; and his disavowal is a proved falsehood. Lady Mary, exasperated, forgot her good sense and her feminine dignity, and made common cause with Lord Hervey (the Lord Fanny and the Sporus of the Satires.) They concocted an attack in verse, addressed to the imitator of Horace; but nothing could be more unequal than such a warfare. Pope, in return, grasped the blasting and vollied lightnings of his wit, and would have annihilated both his adversaries, if more than half a grain of truth had been on his side. But posterity has been just: in his anger, he overcharged his weapon, it recoiled, and the engineer has been "hoisted by his own petard."
Lady Mary's personal negligence afforded grounds for Pope's coarse and severe allusions to the "colour of her linen, &c." His asperity, however, did not reform her in this respect: it was a fault which increased with age and foreign habits. Horace Walpole, who met her at Florence twenty years afterwards, draws a hateful and disgusting picture of her, as "old, dirty, tawdry, painted," and flirting and gambling with all the young men in the place. But Walpole is terribly satirical; he had a personal dislike to Lady Mary Wortley, whom he coarsely designates as Moll Worthless,—and his description is certainly overcharged. How differently the same characters will strike different people! Spence, who also met Lady Mary abroad, about that time, thus writes to his mother: "I always desired to be acquainted with Lady Mary, and could never bring it about, though we were so often together in London. Soon after we came to this place, her ladyship came here, and in five days I was well acquainted with her. She is one of the most shining characters in the world,—but shines like a comet: she is all irregularity, and always wandering: the most wise, most imprudent, loveliest, most disagreeable, best-natured, cruellest woman in the world!" Walpole could see nothing but her dirt and her paint. Those who recollect his coarse description, and do not remember her letters to her daughter, written from Italy about the same time, would do well to refer to them as a corrective: it is always so easy to be satirical and ill-natured, and sometimes so difficult to be just and merciful!
The cold scornful levity with which she treated certain topics, is mingled with touches of tenderness and profound thought, which show her to have been a disappointed, not a heartless woman. The extreme care with which she cultivated pleasurable feelings and ideas, and shrunk from all disagreeable impressions; her determination never to view her own face in a glass, after the approach of age, or to pronounce the name of her mad, profligate son, may be referred to a cause very different from either selfishness or vanity: but I think the principle was mistaken. While she was amusing herself with her silk-worms and her orangerie at Como, her husband Wortley, with whom she kept up a constant correspondence, was hoarding money and drinking tokay to keep himself alive. He died, however, in 1761; and that he was connected with the motives, whatever those were, which induced Lady Mary to reside abroad, is proved by the fact, that the moment she heard of his death she prepared to return to England, and she reached London in January 1762. "Lady Mary is arrived," says Walpole, writing to George Montagu. "I have seen her. I think her avarice, her dirt, and her vivacity, are all increased. Her dress, like her language, is a galimatias of several countries. She needs no cap, no handkerchief, no gown, no petticoat, no shoes; an old black-laced hood represents the first; the fur of a horseman's coat, which replaces the third, serves for the second; a dimity petticoat is deputy, and officiates for the fourth; and slippers act the part of the last." About six months after her arrival she died in the arms of her daughter, the Countess of Bute, of a cruel and shocking disease, the agonies of which she had borne with heroism rather than resignation. The present Marquess of Bute, and the present Lord Wharncliffe, are the great-grandsons of this distinguished woman: the latter is the representative of the Wortley family.
FOOTNOTES:
[129] In Litchfield Cathedral stands the only memorial ever raised, by public or private gratitude, to Lady Mary; it is a cenotaph, with Beauty weeping the loss of her preserver, and an inscription, of which the following words form the conclusion:—"To perpetuate the memory of such benevolence, and to express her gratitude for the benefit she herself received from this alleviating art, this monument is erected by Henrietta Inge, relict of Theodore William Inge, and daughter of Sir John Wrottesley, Bart, in 1789." One would like to have known the woman who raised this monument.
[130] "You shall see (said Lady Mary referring to these letters) what a goddess he made of me in some of them, though he makes such a devil of me in his writings afterwards, without any reason that I know of."—Spence.