amusing to learn that the inoculation of the young Edward Wortley Montagu proved presently to have an advantage which was certainly not at the time of the operation present to the mind of the mother.  At the age of six or thereabouts, the child ran away from Westminster school—­he was always running away from school—­and a reward of L20 and expenses was offered to whoever found him.  The advertisement gave the following clue:  there are “two marks by which he is easily known, viz., on the back of each arm, about two or three inches above the wrist, a small roundish scar, less than a silver penny, like a large mark of the small-pox.”

When Lady Mary returned to London, she carried out her intention to introduce the operation.  Dr. Maitland, who had been physician to the mission to the Porte, set up in practice and inoculated under her patronage.  The “heathen rite” was vigorously preached against by the clergy and was violently abused by the medical faculty.  Undismayed by the powerful opposition, however, she persevered in season and out, until her efforts were crowned with success.  She was fortunate in enlisting the co-operation of that distinguished doctor, Richard Mead, celebrated by Pope in his “Epistle to Bolingbroke,”

  “I’ll do what Mead and Cheselden advise.”

Mead, in 1720, when an epidemic of the plague was feared in London, published a treatise:  “A Short Discourse concerning Pestilential Contagion and the Methods to be used to Prevent it.”  It was reprinted seven times within a year, and an eighth edition appeased in 1722.  Lady Mary obtained permission, in 1721, to experiment on seven condemned criminals.  Mead supervised the inoculations, and all recovered.  In the following year two members of the royal family underwent the operation successfully.  Thereafter, it became, in most circles, fashionable.

“I suppose,” Lady Mary wrote with pardonable pride to Lady Mar in the spring of 1722, “that the same faithful historians give you regular accounts of the growth and spreading of the inoculation of the small-pox, which is become almost a general practice, attended with great success.”  Elated as she was at the success that had resulted from her persistent efforts, she was correspondingly distressed when a young relative died of the disease.  “I am sorry to inform you of the death, of our nephew, my sister Gower’s son, of the small-pox,” she said in a letter to Lady Mar in July, 1723.  “I think she has a great deal of regret it, in consideration of the offer I made her, two years together, of taking the child home to my house, where I would have inoculated him with the same care and safety I did my own.  I know nobody that has hitherto repented the operation; though it has been very troublesome to some fools, who had rather be sick by the doctor’s prescriptions, than in health in rebellion to the college.”

Among those who supported Lady Mary’s campaign was Steele, who congratulated her upon her “godlike delight” of saving “many thousand British lives every year.”  He wrote on the subject in the Plain Dealer (July 3, 1724), in an article that attracted much attention: