Her rival Duchess, Sarah of Marlborough, suffered from the satirical castigation of Pope, in one of those epistles which Bolingbroke pronounced to be his best.[318] The famous and certainly in their way unequalled lines on Atossa were shown to the Duchess of Marlborough, as if they were designed for her grace of Buckingham. But the shrewd Sarah knew the faithful, though highly-coloured portrait. She checked the person who was reading to her, and called out aloud, “I see what you mean; I cannot be so imposed upon.” She abused Pope violently, but was afterwards reconciled to the great satirist, and is said to have given him a thousand pounds to suppress the character.[319] Such is the statement; but it would have been more like the Duchess to have braved the world, and to have permitted the inimitable satire to see the light. She could scarcely be rendered more unpopular than she had hitherto been. The death of George the First produced no change in the station held as first Lord of the Treasury by Sir Robert Walpole; a minister who seems to have been, as a man, peculiarly obnoxious to the Duchess of Marlborough, and with whom she was, at various periods of her life, at variance. Since the death of Lord Sunderland, Sir Robert Walpole had been making rapid advances to the office of prime minister. He resumed that office, on the accession of George the Second, with an accumulated national debt amounting to fifty millions.[320] Although coinciding with Sir Robert in what she termed her Whig principles, the Duchess could never assimilate with a character so unlike the statesmen whom she had known and revered; so opposite in his nature to the disinterested Godolphin, whom she had seen placed upon a similar eminence, and whose fidelity and honour she constantly extols. Even the popular qualities of this noted minister were repulsive to her aristocratic notions; and with the Duchess prejudice was ever more powerful than reason. Sir Robert was, in her estimation, one of “the worst bred men she ever saw;” and coarse as the Duchess has been represented, no one had more insight into character, nor had greater experience of those manners which charm the fancy and elevate the tone of social life. Sir Robert Walpole’s most popular qualities were beneath her praise. His good-nature she might admire, but it was accompanied by freedom of manners, vulgarity of language, and profligacy in conduct. The dignity of station was never understood by him. He had neither elevation of mind to compass great designs, nor depravity to conceive schemes of wickedness. Yet he injured virtue daily, by ridiculing that nice sense of her perfection which we call honour. “When he found,” says Lord Chesterfield, “anybody proof against pecuniary temptations—which was, alas! but seldom—he laughed at and ridiculed all notions of public virtue, and the love of one’s country, calling them the chimerical schoolboy flights of classical learning,