“I send you a novel instead of a letter, but, as it is in your power to shorten it when you please, by reading no farther than you like, I will make no excuses for the length of it.”

Lady Mary had contracted an intimacy with Griselda Baillie, the wife of Mr. (afterwards Sir A.) Murray, of Stanhope, after her return from abroad, and there is frequent mention of her in the correspondence; but the friendship came to an abrupt end in 1725.

“Among the rest a very odd whim has entered the little head of Mrs. Murray:  do you know she won’t visit me this winter?” Lady Mary wrote to Lady Mar.  “I, according to the usual integrity of my heart, and simplicity of my manners, with great naivete desired to explain with her on the subject, and she answered that she was convinced that I had made the ballad upon her, and was resolved never to speak to me again.  I answered (which was true), that I utterly defied her to have any one single proof of my making it, without being able to get any thing from her, but repetitions that she knew it.  I cannot suppose that any thing you have said should occasion this rupture, and the reputation of a quarrel is always so ridiculous on both sides, that you will oblige me in mentioning it to her, for ’tis now at that pretty pass, she won’t curtsey to me whenever she mets me, which is superlatively silly (if she really knew it), after a suspension of resentment for two years together.”

Mrs. Murray had had an unpleasant adventure with her footman, Arthur Grey, who had broken into her bedroom.  Lady Mary had written and circulated An Epistle from Arthur Grey, and later another, and an improper, ballad had appeared under the title of Virtue in Danger.  Mrs. Murray was firmly convinced that both pieces came from the same pen.

Lady Mar, on receipt of the above letter, proposed to act as peacemaker.  “I give you thanks for the good offices you promise with regard to Mrs. Murray,” Lady Mary wrote to her in reply, “and I shall think myself sincerely obliged to you, as I already am on many accounts.  ’Tis very disagreeable in her to go about behaving and talking as she does, and very silly into the bargain.”

“Mrs. Murray is in open war with me in such a manner as makes her very ridiculous without doing me much harm; my moderation having a very bright pretence of shewing itself” (she wrote to Lady Mar).  “Firstly, she was pleased to attack me in very Billingsgate at a masquerade, where she was as visible as ever she was in her own clothes.  I had the temper not only to keep silence myself, but enjoined it to the person with me; who would have been very glad to have shewn his great skill in sousing upon that occasion.  She endeavoured to sweeten him by very exorbitant praises of his person, which might even have been mistaken for making love from a woman of less celebrated virtue; and concluded her oration with pious warnings to him, to avoid the conversation