"VERSES ADDRESSED TO THE IMITATOR OF THE FIRST SATIRE OF THE SECOND BOOK OF HORACE. _By a Lady_ "Nor thou the justice of the world disown. That leaves thee thus an outcast and alone: For though in law the murder be to kill, In equity the murder is the will. Then while with coward hand you stab a name, And try at least to assassinate our fame, Like the first bold assassin be thy lot, Ne'er be thy guilt forgiven or forgot; But as thou hat'st by hatred 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." It was this malignant attack upon his person that inspired Pope's lines in the _Epistle to Arbuthnot_: "Once, and but once, his heedless youth was bit, And liked that dangerous thing, a female wit. Safe, so he thought, though all the prudent chid; He writ no libels, but my lady did; Great odds, in amorous or poetic game, Where woman's is the sin, and man's the shame." With the following extract from a letter written by Lady Mary from Florence in 1740 this unpleasing incident may be dismissed: "The word malignity, and a passage in your letter, call to my mind the wicked wasp of Twickenham: his lies affect me now no more; they will be all as much despised as the story of the seraglio and the handkerchief, of which I am persuaded he was the only inventor. That man has a malignant and ungenerous heart; and he is base enough to assume the mask of a moralist, in order to decry human nature, and to give a decent vent to his hatred of man and woman kind.--But I must quit this contemptible subject, on which a just indignation would render my pen so fertile, that after having fatigued you with a long letter, I would surfeit you with a supplement twice as long." At Twickenham Lady Mary interested herself in planning alterations in the house and gardens. "There is a sort of pleasure," she said, "in shewing one's own fancy on one's own ground." The longer she stayed at the riverside, the better she liked it. "I am at present at Twickenham," she wrote in July, 1723, "which is become so fashionable, and the neighbourhood so much enlarged, that 'tis more like Tunbridge or the Bath than a country retreat."