“Let Sporus tremble! what! that thing of silk! Sporus that mere white curd of asses’ milk! Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel? Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings This painted child of dirt that stinks and stings Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoys Yet wit ne’er tastes and beauty ne’er enjoys; So well bred spaniels civilly delight In mumbling of the game they dare not bite, Eternal smiles his emptiness betray As shallow streams run dimpling all the way Whether in florid impotence he speaks And as the prompter breathes, the puppet squeaks; Or at the ear of Eve, familiar toad Half froth, half venom, spits himself abroad. In puns or politics, in tales or lies Or spite, or smut or rhymes, or blasphemies; His wit all see-saw between that and this Now high, now low, now master up, now miss. And he, himself, one vile antithesis. Amphibious thing! that acting either part The trifling head or the corrupted heart Fop at the toilet, flatterer at the Board Now trips a lady, and now struts a lord. Eve’s tempter thus the Rabbins have expressed A cherub’s face and reptile all the rest Beauty that shocks you, parts that none will trust Wit that can creep and pride that licks the dust.” To this apparently Lord Hervey vouchsafed no retort, so Pope was adjudged to have been the victor in the affair. But not content with this, he wrote an open letter in prose to Lord Hervey. But this was suppressed, as Queen Caroline got hold of a copy of it, and desired Pope not to publish it, as it held her dear friend and companion up to the most cutting ridicule. She hated Pope for this, but concealed her rage lest worse should come of it. But Lord Hervey’s duels were not all confined to poetry; he had one with Pulteney, and the weapons were not words but swords. This occurred in 1730. It was a squabble over the authorship of a pamphlet called “Sedition and Defamation Displayed,” which attacked both Pulteney and Bolingbroke very severely, and with the writing of which Hervey was credited, and unjustly as it turned out eventually. The heated Pulteney, however, rushed into print, and published another pamphlet “A Proper Reply to a late Scurrilous Libel” in which he abused Walpole and Hervey, referring to the latter by his nickname of “Lord Fanny,” and depicted him half man and half woman, dragging in, as was usual, in those days with execrable taste, certain of Hervey’s infirmities.