at they were merely good comrades--good comrades of the type that
might bite or scratch at any moment. Horace Walpole, who was more than
usually malicious where Lady Mary was concerned, could scarcely induce
himself to allow her any qualities. "My Lady Stafford,"[5] he wrote to
George Montagu in 1751, "used to live at Twickenham when Lady Mary
Wortley and the Duke of Wharton lived there; she had more wit than both
of them. What would I give to have had Strawberry Hill twenty years ago!
I think anything but twenty years. Lady Stafford used to say to her
sister, 'Well, child, I have come without my wit to-day'; that is, she
had not taken her opium, which she was forced to do if she had any
appointment, to be in particular spirits."

[Footnote 5: Claude Charlotte, Countess of Stafford, wife of Henry, Earl of
Stafford, and daughter of Philibert, Count of Grammont, and Elizabeth
Hamilton, his wife.]

Horace Walpole alluded to Lady Mary and the Duke in "The Parish Register
of Twickenham":

"Twickenham, where frolic Wharton revelled
Where Montagu, with locks dishevelled.
Conflict of dirt and warmth combin'd,
Invoked--and scandalised the _Nine_."

What Pope thought of the Duke he expressed with the utmost vigour:

"Wharton, the scorn and wonder of our days,
Whose ruling passion was the lust of praise:
Born with whate'er could win it from the wise,
Women and fools must like him, or he dies:
Though wondering senates hung on all he spoke.
The club must hail him master of the joke.
Shall parts so various aim at nothing new?
He'll shine a Tully and a Wilmot too.
Then turns repentant, and his God adores
With the same spirit that he drinks and whores;
Enough, if all around him but admire,
And now the punk applaud, and now the friar.
Thus with each gift of nature and of art,
And wanting nothing but an honest heart;
Grown all to all; from no one vice exempt,
And most contemptible, to shun contempt:
His passion still, to covet general praise,
His life, to forfeit it a thousand ways;
A constant bounty which no friend has made;
An angel tongue, which no man can persuade;
A fool, with more of wit than half mankind;
Too rash for thought, for action too refined:
A tyrant to his wife his heart approves;
A rebel to the very king he loves;
He dies, sad outcast of each church and state,
And, harder still! flagitious, yet not great.
Ask you wh