l-favored, as Horace Walpole was spiteful
enough to put on record. When Pope was laughed at by the beauty, he
might have said to her in the words that Clarendon used to the fair
Castlemaine, "Woman, you will grow old," and have felt that in those
words he had almost repaid the bitterness of her scorn. Horace Walpole
indeed avenged the offended poet, long dead and famous, when he wrote
thus of Lady Mary: "Her dress, her avarice, and her impudence must amaze
any one that never heard her name. She wears a foul mob that does not
cover her greasy black locks, that hang loose, never combed or curled; an
old mazarine blue wrapper, that gapes open and discovers a canvas
petticoat. Her face . . . partly covered . . . with white paint, which
for cheapness she has bought so coarse that you would not use it to wash
a chimney." Such is one of the latest portraits of the woman who had
been a poet's idol and the cherished beauty of a Court. Lady Mary, who
had outlived her husband, left an exemplary daughter, who married Lord
Bute, and a most unexemplary son, to whom she bequeathed one guinea, and
who spent the greater part of his life drifting about the East, and
acquiring all kinds of strange and useless knowledge.

{152}

CHAPTER IX.

"MALICE DOMESTIC.--FOREIGN LEVY."

[Sidenote: 1716--Visit to Hanover]

Some of the earlier letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu are written
from Hanover, and give a lively description of the crowded state of
that capital in the autumn of 1716. Hanover was crowded in this
unusual way because King George was there at the time, and his presence
was the occasion for a great gathering of diplomatic functionaries and
statesmen, and politicians of all orders. Some had political missions,
open and avowed; some had missions of still greater political
importance, which, however, were not formally avowed, and were for the
most part conducted in secret. A turning-point had been reached in the
affairs of Europe, and the King's visit to Hanover was an appropriate
occasion for the preliminary steps to certain new arrangements that had
become inevitable. Even before the King's visit to his dear Hanover
the English Government had been paving the way for some of these new
combinations and alliances. The very day after the royal coronation,
Stanhope had gone on a mission to Vienna which had something to do with
the arrangements subsequently made.

It would, however, be paying too high a compliment