Such was the physician and friend of Marlborough. It appears an endless task to enumerate and to portray the numerous literary characters who poured forth their tribute to the greatness of the Duke, or who shared the favour of the Duchess of Marlborough. Devoid as they both were of any decided literary bias, they were nevertheless, in various ways, so much connected with some writers and wits of the day, that it may not be deemed irrelevant to bring forward a few of those who were thus distinguished. The offensive lines written by Pope upon the character of the Duchess, as Atossa, could not have been the production of a friend. That the Duchess, in her intercourse with the great and gay, encountered frequently the master-spirit of the day, whose religious and political prepossessions led him to write her attributes in characters of gall, cannot be doubted. Pope, however, was not, it appears, one of her correspondents; and subsequently, in her intimacy with Lady Mary Wortley Montague, the Duchess cherished his bitterest enemy. That gifted woman, indeed, found in the Duchess a kindred spirit. The collision of such minds must have been remarkable. Lady Mary was yet in her prime, when the Duchess, morose, and a cripple, delighted to visit her, and to entertain her brilliant friend, and be in turn entertained. The great world, its hollowness, and its consequent disappointments, were sufficiently unveiled to both, to render the confidence of social life comparatively delightful. Yet both still loved the world too well; both were essentially worldly in their natures. The one turned her calculating mind to power; the other to admiration. The career of their youth, brilliant in each, was in each succeeded by a joyless, an unloved, almost a despised old age.