operation; and the French embassador says pleasantly, that they take the small-pox here by way of diversion, as they take the waters in other countries. There is no example of any one that has died in it; and you may believe I am very well satisfied of the safety of this experiment, since I intend to try it on my dear little son. "I am patriot enough to take pains to bring this useful invention into fashion in England; and I should not fail to write to some of our doctors very particularly about it, if I knew any one of them that I thought had virtue enough to destroy such a considerable branch of their revenue for the good of mankind. But that distemper is too beneficial to them not to expose to all their resentment the hardy wight that should undertake to put an end to it. Perhaps, if I live to return, I may, however, have courage to war with them. Upon this occasion admire the heroism in the heart of your friend, &c." The immediate history of inoculation, so far as Lady Mary is concerned, may here briefly be given. She first heard of the practice in March, 1717, and within a year her faith in its effect was so strong that in the spring of the following year she had her son inoculated at Pera--he was the first English person to undergo the operation. "The boy was engrafted last Tuesday," she wrote to her husband the following Sunday, "and is at this time singing and playing, and very impatient for his supper.... I cannot engraft the girl; her nurse has not had the small-pox." It is amusing to learn that the inoculation of the young Edward Wortley Montagu proved presently to have an advantage which was certainly not at the time of the operation present to the mind of the mother. At the age of six or thereabouts, the child ran away from Westminster school--he was always running away from school--and a reward of £20 and expenses was offered to whoever found him. The advertisement gave the following clue: there are "two marks by which he is easily known, _viz_., on the back of each arm, about two or three inches above the wrist, a small roundish scar, less than a silver penny, like a large mark of the small-pox." When Lady Mary returned to London, she carried out her intention to introduce the operation. Dr. Maitland, who had been physician to the mission to the Porte, set up in practice and inoculated under her patronage. The "heathen rite" was vigorously preached against by the clergy and was violently abused by the medical faculty. Undismayed by the powerful opposition, however, she persevered in season and out, until her efforts were crowned with success. She was fortunate in enlisting the co-operation of that distinguished doctor, Richard Mead, celebrated by Pope in his "Epistle to Bolingbroke," "I'll do what Mead and Cheselden advise."