Anyhow, it is a sorry story, and a blot on the scutcheon of the poet, who, good-hearted as he usually was, was cursed by the gift, refined to a rare degree, of alienating his friends, more often than not for some fancied slight.  Addison he lampooned, and from Dennis and Philips he parted company.  “Leave him as soon as you can,” Addison had warned Lady Mary.  “He will certainly play you some devilish trick else:  he has an appetite for satire.”  Lady Mary presently must have wished that she had followed this sage counsel.

When Pope fought, he fought with the gloves off; and not the sex or the age or the standing of the subject of his wrath deterred him a whit.

  “Have I, in silent wonder, seen such things
   As pride in slaves, and avarice in kings;
   And at a peer, or peeress, shall I fret,
   Who starves a sister, or forswears a debt?”

Thus Pope in the First Dialogue of the Epilogue to the Satires. The reference to forswearing a debt, is, of course, to the Remond business; “who starves a sister” is an allusion to Lady Mary and Lady Mar.[6]

[Footnote 6:  See p. 200 of this work.]

Pope returned to the attack again and again.  In The Satires of Dr. John Donne Versified, he inserted the following lines, although there is nothing in the original to warrant the stroke at Lady Mary: 

  “Yes, thank my stars! as early as I knew
   This town, I had the sense to hate it too: 
   Yet here, as e’en in hell, there must be still
   One giant vice, so excellently ill. 
   That all beside, one pities, not abhors: 
   As who knows Sappho, smiles at other whores.”

Again, in the Epistle to Martha Blount: 

  “As Sappho’s diamonds with her dirty smock;
   Or Sappho at her toilet’s greasy task,
   With Sappho radiant at an evening mask.”

Pope would not admit that he alluded to Lady Mary as Sappho, but everyone realised that this was so.  Lady Mary, much distressed, begged Lord Peterborough to urge Pope to refrain.  The mission was undertaken reluctantly, and the result was scarcely satisfactory.  “He said to me,” Lord Peterborough wrote to Lady Mary, “what I had taken the liberty of saying to you, that he wondered how the town would apply these lines to any but some noted common woman; that he would yet be more surprised if you should take them to yourself; he named to me four remarkable poetesses and scribblers, Mrs. Centlivre, Mrs. Heywood, Mrs. Manley, and Mrs. Behn, assuring me that such only were the objects of his satire.”

Much upset, Lady Mary wrote the following letter to Arbuthnot: 

January 3 [1735].

“Sir,