Lady Mary was, of course, entirely ignorant of Horace Walpole’s feelings about her, of which naturally he showed no sign in social intercourse with her.  “I saw him often both at Florence and Genoa, and you may believe I know him,” she told her daughter.  “I was well acquainted with Mr. Walpole at Florence, and indeed he was particularly civil to me,” she wrote on another occasion.  “I have great encouragement to ask favour of him, if I did not know that few people have so good memories to remember so many years backwards as have passed since I have seen him.  If he has treated the character of Queen Elizabeth with disrespect [in A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England], all the women should tear him to pieces, for abusing the glory of their sex.  Neither is it just to put her in the list of authors, having never published anything, though we have Mr. Camden’s authority that she wrote many valuable pieces, chiefly Greek translations.  I wish all monarchs would bestow their leisure hours on such studies:  perhaps they would not be very useful to mankind; but it may be asserted, for a certain truth, their own minds could be more improved than by the amusements of quadrille or Cavagnole.”

Lady Mary need not have feared that Walpole had forgotten her; he bore her much in mind to his dying day, and found never a kind thing to say about her.  It may be presumed that his animosity arose from the fact that Lady Mary had championed Molly Skerritt against his mother, when Miss Skerritt was living openly as the mistress of Sir Robert Walpole.  Yet, though he wrote so abusively about her, he concerned himself with a new edition of the Court Poems, though with what right has never transpired.  “I have lately had Lady Mary Wortley’s Ecloques published; but they don’t please, though so excessively good,” he wrote to Sir Horace Mann, November 24, 1747.  “I say so confidently, for Mr. Chute agrees with me:  he says, for the Epistle from Arthur Grey, scarce any woman could have written it, and no man; for a man who had had experience enough to paint such sentiments so well, would not have had warmth enough left.  Do you know anything of Lady Mary?  Her adventurous son is come in Parliament, but has not opened.”

From Florence, Lady Mary repaired to Rome.  There, she did not see the Chevalier de St. George, but she did see his two sons, Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, and Henry, Cardinal York.  “The eldest seems thoughtless enough, and is really not unlike Mr. Lyttelton in his shape and air,” she wrote to Montagu.  “The youngest is very well made, dances finely, and has an ingenuous countenance; he is but fourteen years of age.  The family live very splendidly, yet pay everybody, and (wherever they get it) are certainly in no want of money.”

Lady Mary seems to have had no prepared itinerary, but to have wandered as the spirit moved her—­Naples, Leghorn, Turin, Genoa.  The cheapness of Italy appealed to her frugal mind.