for you,
fear for you through whole folios, you make me shrink at the past
dangers of dead travellers, and when I read an agreeable prospect or
delightful place, I hope it yet subsists to give you pleasure. I inquire
the roads, the amusements, the company of every town and country you
pass through, with as much diligence, as if I were to set out next week
to overtake you. In a word no one can have you more constantly in mind,
not even your guardian-angel (if you have one), and I am willing to
indulge so much Popery as to fancy some Being takes care of you who
knows your value better than you do yourself. I am willing to think that
Heaven never gave so much self-neglect and resolution to a woman, to
occasion her calamity, but am pious enough to believe those qualities
must be intended to her benefit and her glory."

Pope's letters of this period to Lady Mary were all written in a strain
of adulation, which may well have pleased Lady Mary and must certainly
have amused her. She can, however, scarcely have been led into any
self-deception as regards the sincerity of her correspondent, in spite
of the fact that in one of the earliest epistles he addressed to her he
subscribed himself: "I am, with all unalterable esteem and sincerity,
Madam, your most faithful, obedient, humble servant." Yet, no doubt, she
was pleased enough to read: "I communicated your letter to Mr. Congreve;
he thinks of you as he ought, I mean as I do, for one always thinks that
to be just as it ought.... We never meet but we lament over you: we pay
a kind of weekly rites to your memory, when we strew flowers of rhetoric
and offer such libations to your name as if it were a profaneness to
call toasting." Well, alcoholic refreshment by any other name is just as
potent. It must have been grateful and comforting to be told when in
exile: "I must tell you, too, that the Duke of Buckingham has been more
than once your high priest in performing the office of your praises: and
upon the whole I believe there are few men who do not deplore your
departure, as women that sincerely do."

Most excellent Pope, who would play at make-believe. It is almost a pity
that he could not persuade the lady that he meant even a tithe of what
he wrote to her. Listen to him again: "For my part, I hate a great many
women for your sake, and undervalue all the rest. 'Tis you who are to
blame, and may God revenge it upon you, with all those blessings and
earthy prosperities which t