Wander, like him accursed, through the land.
In the same poem Pope was told:—
None thy crabbed numbers can endure
Hard as thy heart, and as thy birth obscure.
This brutal allusion to Pope’s physical infirmities and his birth stung the most sensitive of poets to the quick. In this duel of wits, Hervey had chosen verse as his weapon, forgetting that in this line his adversary had no equal, and Pope seized the advantage. Hervey had set him an unworthy example, which he did not hesitate to follow, and he raked up everything which approached physical hideousness, weakness, or deformity in the person and mind of his adversary. According to Lord Hailes, “Lord Hervey, having felt some attacks of epilepsy, entered upon and persisted in a very strict regimen, and thus stopped the progress and prevented the effects of that dreadful disease. His daily food was a small quantity of ass’s milk and a flour biscuit. Once a week he indulged himself with eating an apple; he used emetics daily. Lord Hervey used paint to soften his ghastly appearance.” All these weaknesses were seized upon by Pope, and put into a poem wherein Lord Hervey was satirized as “Sporus”.
Let Sporus tremble! what! that thing of silk!
Sporus, that mere white curd of ass’s milk!
Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel?
Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?
Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings,