After a time Lady Mary began to grow rather weary of her poet, but he, on the contrary, became even more arduous, and was at last led into making her a passionate declaration of love. She received it by laughing in his face. Pope was keenly sensitive to ridicule, his deformity made him more so than most men; he was of a highly strung disposition, and Lady Mary’s outburst of hilarity was a thing he could neither forget nor forgive. He withdrew deeply mortified and offended. His vanity could not understand how the beautiful Lady Mary could reject him with such disdain if another had not stolen her from him. He formed the idea that Lord Hervey was his rival, and against him therefore directed all his malice, spleen and hatred. A scurrilous paper war began. Lord Hervey dabbled in poetry, not of great merit, and Pope savagely attacked it. Speaking of one of his own satires, against which he pretended a charge of weakness had been brought, he says:-- The lines are weak, another’s pleased to say, Lord Fanny spins a thousand such a day. And again:-- Like gentle Fanny’s was my flow’ry theme A painted mistress, or a purling stream. Hervey, who thought his namby-pamby verses really poetry, was stung to the quick by this contemptuous allusion, and, smarting under the satire, was foolish enough to retaliate upon Pope in a poor effusion addressed “To the Imitator of the Satires of the Second Book of Horace”. It runs:-- Thus, whilst with coward hand you stab a name, And try at least t’ assassinate our fame; Like the first bold assassin’s be thy lot; And ne’er be thy guilt forgiven, or forgot; But as thou hat’st, be hated by mankind, And with the emblem of thy crooked mind Marked on thy back, like Cain, by God’s own hand, Wander, like him accursed, through the land. In the same poem Pope was told:-- None thy crabbed numbers can endure Hard as thy heart, and as thy birth obscure. This brutal allusion to Pope’s physical infirmities and his birth stung the most sensitive of poets to the quick. In this duel of wits, Hervey had chosen verse as his weapon, forgetting that in this line his adversary had no equal, and Pope seized the advantage. Hervey had set him an unworthy example, which he did not hesitate to follow, and he raked up everything which approached physical hideousness, weakness, or deformity in the person and mind of his adversary. According to Lord Hailes, “Lord Hervey, having felt some attacks of epilepsy, entered upon and persisted in a very strict regimen, and thus stopped the progress and prevented the effects of that dreadful disease. His daily food was a small quantity of ass’s milk and a flour biscuit. Once a week he indulged himself with eating an apple; he used emetics daily. Lord Hervey used paint to soften his ghastly appearance.” All these weaknesses were seized upon by Pope, and put into a poem wherein Lord Hervey was satirized as “Sporus”.