“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 in her sixty-second year.  It is possible, but extremely improbable, therefore, that Lady Mary should have taken a young man into keeping.  Horace Walpole may always be trusted to make the best of a rumour.  Still, it may be stated, on the authority of Wright, that among Lady Mary’s papers there was found a long account of the matter, written in Italian.  In this she mentioned that for some time she had been forcibly detained in a country house belonging to an Italian Count and occupied by him and his mother.  This paper, it is further mentioned, seems to have been submitted to a lawyer for his opinion or for production in a court of law.  It may be, of course, that Lady Mary did, to some extent, adopt the young man, who thought that by keeping possession of her person he might be able to extort money from her.