It was this malignant attack upon his person that inspired Pope’s lines in the Epistle to Arbuthnot: 

  “Once, and but once, his heedless youth was bit,
   And liked that dangerous thing, a female wit. 
   Safe, so he thought, though all the prudent chid;
   He writ no libels, but my lady did;
   Great odds, in amorous or poetic game,
   Where woman’s is the sin, and man’s the shame.”

With the following extract from a letter written by Lady Mary from Florence in 1740 this unpleasing incident may be dismissed: 

“The word malignity, and a passage in your letter, call to my mind the wicked wasp of Twickenham:  his lies affect me now no more; they will be all as much despised as the story of the seraglio and the handkerchief, of which I am persuaded he was the only inventor.  That man has a malignant and ungenerous heart; and he is base enough to assume the mask of a moralist, in order to decry human nature, and to give a decent vent to his hatred of man and woman kind.—­But I must quit this contemptible subject, on which a just indignation would render my pen so fertile, that after having fatigued you with a long letter, I would surfeit you with a supplement twice as long.”

At Twickenham Lady Mary interested herself in planning alterations in the house and gardens.  “There is a sort of pleasure,” she said, “in shewing one’s own fancy on one’s own ground.”  The longer she stayed at the riverside, the better she liked it.  “I am at present at Twickenham,” she wrote in July, 1723, “which is become so fashionable, and the neighbourhood so much enlarged, that ’tis more like Tunbridge or the Bath than a country retreat.”

“I am now at the same distance from London that you are from Paris, and could fall into solitary amusements with a good deal of taste; but I resist it, as a temptation of Satan, and rather turn my endeavours to make the world as agreeable to me as I can, which is the true philosophy; that of despising it is of no use but to hasten wrinkles” (she wrote to Lady Mar in 1725).  “I ride a good deal, and have got a horse superior to any two-legged animal, he being without a fault.  I work like an angel.  I receive visits upon idle days, and I shade my life as I do my tent-stitch, that is, make as easy transitions as I can from business to pleasure; the one would be too flaring and gaudy without some dark shades of t’other; and if I worked altogether in the grave colours, you know ’twould be quite dismal.  Miss Skerritt is in the house with, me, and Lady Stafford has taken a lodging at Richmond:  as their ages are different, and both agreeable in their kind, I laugh with the one, or reason with the other, as I happen to be in a gay or serious humour; and I manage my friends with such a strong yet with a gentle hand, that they are both willing to do whatever I have a mind to.”