Lady Bute heard that her mother's letters were in existence, and, fearful of what they might contain, purchased them. "It is known that when on her way to die, as it proved, in her own country, Lady Mary gave a copy of the letters to Mr. Snowden, minister of the English church at Rotterdam, attesting the gift by her signature," Lady Louisa Stuart has written. "This showed it was her wish that they should eventually be published; but Lady Bute, hearing only that a number of her mother's letters were in a stranger's hands, and having no certainty what they might be, to whom addressed, or how little of a private matter, could not but earnestly desire to obtain them, and readily paid the price demanded--five hundred pounds. In a few months she saw them appear in print. Such was the fact, and how it came about nobody at this time of day need either care or inquire." With regard to other correspondence of Lady Mary, Sir Robert Walpole returned to her the letters she had written to his second wife, Molly Skerritt, after the death of that lady; and when Lord Hervey died, his eldest son sealed up and sent her her letters, with an assurance that he had read none of them. To Lord Hervey's heir, Lady Louisa Stuart has mentioned, Lady Mary wrote a letter of thanks for his honourable conduct, adding that she could almost regret he had not glanced his eye over a correspondence which would have shown him what so young a man might perhaps be inclined to doubt--the possibility of a long and steady friendship subsisting between two persons of different sexes without the least mixture of love. Much pleased with this letter, he preserved it; and, when Lady Mary came to England, showed it to Lady Bute desiring she would ask leave for him to visit her mother. It is to be presumed that Lady Mary, or her daughter, Lady Bute, destroyed these collections. For her part, Lady Mary returned letters that she had received from Lord Hervey, but only those that belonged to the last fourteen years of an acquaintance that had endured twice so long. These are for the greater number platonic in character, although there are a few phrases of a freer kind. Croker, who edited Lord Hervey's _Memoirs_, mentions that Hervey, answering one of her letters in 1737, in which she had complained that she was too old to inspire passion, after paying a compliment to her charms more gallant than decorous, said: "I should think anybody a great fool that said he liked spring better than summer merely because it is further from autumn, or that they loved green fruit better than ripe only because it was further from being rotten. I ever did, and believe ever shall, like women best-- "Just in the noon of life--those golden days, When the mind ripens as the form decays." Lady Mary was then in her forty-ninth year, being six years Hervey's senior.