“In general, gallantry never was in so elevated a figure as it is at present.  Twenty very pretty fellows (the Duke of Wharton being president and chief director) have formed themselves into a committee of gallantry.  They call themselves Schemers; and meet regularly three times a week, to consult on gallant schemes for the advantage and advancement of that branch of happiness....  I consider the duty of a true Englishwoman is to do what honour she can to her native country; and that it would be a sin against the pious love I bear the land of my nativity, to confine the renown due to the Schemers within the small extent of this little island, which ought to be spread wherever men can sigh, or women wish.  ’Tis true they have the envy and curses of the old and ugly of both sexes, and a general persecution from all old women; but this is no more than all reformations must expect in their beginning.”

More than one writer has asserted that it was the wit and beauty of Lady Mary that drew him thither.  At the time the Duke was twenty-four and the lady nine years older.  Certainly he paid her marked attention, but as he paid marked attention to all women who had not a hump or a squint—­ sometimes, maybe, he even overlooked the squint—­it is as impossible to say whether he was in love with her as it is to assert that she was in love with him.  From the little that is known of their intimacy, it would seem that they were merely good comrades—­good comrades of the type that might bite or scratch at any moment.  Horace Walpole, who was more than usually malicious where Lady Mary was concerned, could scarcely induce himself to allow her any qualities.  “My Lady Stafford,"[5] he wrote to George Montagu in 1751, “used to live at Twickenham when Lady Mary Wortley and the Duke of Wharton lived there; she had more wit than both of them.  What would I give to have had Strawberry Hill twenty years ago!  I think anything but twenty years.  Lady Stafford used to say to her sister, ‘Well, child, I have come without my wit to-day’; that is, she had not taken her opium, which she was forced to do if she had any appointment, to be in particular spirits.”

[Footnote 5:  Claude Charlotte, Countess of Stafford, wife of Henry, Earl of Stafford, and daughter of Philibert, Count of Grammont, and Elizabeth Hamilton, his wife.]

Horace Walpole alluded to Lady Mary and the Duke in “The Parish Register of Twickenham”: 

  “Twickenham, where frolic Wharton revelled
   Where Montagu, with locks dishevelled. 
   Conflict of dirt and warmth combin’d,
   Invoked—­and scandalised the Nine.”

What Pope thought of the Duke he expressed with the utmost vigour: 

  “Wharton, the scorn and wonder of our days,
   Whose ruling passion was the lust of praise: 
   Born with whate’er could win it from the wise,
   Women and fools must like him, or he dies: 
   Though wondering senates hung on