te 19: The Duchess of Marlborough was born on May 29, 1660, and
died on October 18, 1744.]

She reverted to the same subject when writing to her husband a month or
two later:

"I can no longer resist the desire I have to know what is become of my
son. I have long suppressed it, from a belief that if there was anything
of good to be told, you would not fail to give me the pleasure of
hearing it. I find it now grows so much upon me, that whatever I am to
know, I think it would be easier for me to support, than the anxiety I
suffer from my doubts. I beg to be informed, and prepare myself for the
worst, with all the philosophy I have. At my time of life I ought to be
detached from a world which I am soon to leave; to be totally so is a
vain endeavour, and perhaps there is vanity in the endeavour: while we
are human, we must submit to human infirmities, and suffer them in mind
as well as body. All that reflection and experience can do is to
mitigate, we can never extinguish, our passions. I call by that name
every sentiment that is not founded upon reason, and own I cannot
justify to mine the concern I feel for one who never gave me any view of
satisfaction.

"This is too melancholy a subject to dwell upon. You compliment me on
the continuation of my spirits: 'tis true, I try to maintain them by
every art I can, being sensible of the terrible consequences of losing
them. Young people are too apt to let theirs sink on any disappointment."

There was, in 1751, some extraordinary incident in the life of Lady
Mary, the true history of which has never been made public.

"Pray tell me," Horace Walpole wrote to Sir Horace Mann on August 31 of
that year, "if you know anything of Lady Mary Wortley: we have an
obscure history here of her being in durance in the Brescian or the
Bergamasco: that a young fellow that she set out with keeping has taken
it into his head to keep her close prisoner, not permitting her to write
or receive any letters but which he sees: he seems determined, if her
husband should die, not to lose her, as the Count [Richcourt] did Lady
Oxford."

No reply to this letter reached Walpole, but his insatiable curiosity
would not accept this as a check, and he wrote again on October 14: "Did
you ever receive the question I asked you about Lady Mary Wortley's
being confined by a lover that she keeps somewhere in the Brescian? I
long to know the particulars."

At the time of this incident Lady Mary was