In a word no one can have you more constantly in mind, not even your guardian-angel (if you have one), and I am willing to indulge so much Popery as to fancy some Being takes care of you who knows your value better than you do yourself.  I am willing to think that Heaven never gave so much self-neglect and resolution to a woman, to occasion her calamity, but am pious enough to believe those qualities must be intended to her benefit and her glory.”

Pope’s letters of this period to Lady Mary were all written in a strain of adulation, which may well have pleased Lady Mary and must certainly have amused her.  She can, however, scarcely have been led into any self-deception as regards the sincerity of her correspondent, in spite of the fact that in one of the earliest epistles he addressed to her he subscribed himself:  “I am, with all unalterable esteem and sincerity, Madam, your most faithful, obedient, humble servant.”  Yet, no doubt, she was pleased enough to read:  “I communicated your letter to Mr. Congreve; he thinks of you as he ought, I mean as I do, for one always thinks that to be just as it ought....  We never meet but we lament over you:  we pay a kind of weekly rites to your memory, when we strew flowers of rhetoric and offer such libations to your name as if it were a profaneness to call toasting.”  Well, alcoholic refreshment by any other name is just as potent.  It must have been grateful and comforting to be told when in exile:  “I must tell you, too, that the Duke of Buckingham has been more than once your high priest in performing the office of your praises:  and upon the whole I believe there are few men who do not deplore your departure, as women that sincerely do.”

Most excellent Pope, who would play at make-believe.  It is almost a pity that he could not persuade the lady that he meant even a tithe of what he wrote to her.  Listen to him again:  “For my part, I hate a great many women for your sake, and undervalue all the rest.  ’Tis you who are to blame, and may God revenge it upon you, with all those blessings and earthy prosperities which the divines tell us, are the cause of our perdition:  for if He makes you happy in this world, I dare trust your own virtue to do it in the other.”  These poets!

Lady Mary took all this in the right way, and as love-letters appraised them at their true value.  “Perhaps you’ll laugh at me for thanking you very gravely for all the obliging concern you express for me,” she wrote from Vienna in September, with, perhaps, just a touch of irony. “’Tis certain that I may, if I please, take the fine things you say to me for wit and raillery; and it may be, it would be taking them right.  But I never in my life was half so well disposed to believe you in earnest; and that distance which makes the continuation of your friendship improbable, has very much increased my faith for it, and I find that I have (as well as the rest of my sex), whatever face I set on’t, a strong disposition to believe in miracles.”