Though sprightly Sappho force our love and praise, A softer wonder my pleased soul surveys,-- The mild Erinna blushing in her bays; So while the sun's broad beam yet strikes the sight, All mild appears the moon's more sober light. Serene in virgin majesty she shines, And unobserved, the glaring orb declines. Soon after appeared that ribald and ruffian-like attack on her in the satires. She sent Lord Peterborough to remonstrate with Pope, to whom he denied the intended application; and his disavowal is a proved falsehood. Lady Mary, exasperated, forgot her good sense and her feminine dignity, and made common cause with Lord Hervey (the Lord Fanny and the Sporus of the Satires.) They concocted an attack in verse, addressed to the imitator of Horace; but nothing could be more unequal than such a warfare. Pope, in return, grasped the blasting and vollied lightnings of his wit, and would have annihilated both his adversaries, if more than half a grain of truth had been on his side. But posterity has been just: in his anger, he overcharged his weapon, it recoiled, and the engineer has been "hoisted by his own petard." Lady Mary's personal negligence afforded grounds for Pope's coarse and severe allusions to the "colour of her linen, &c." His asperity, however, did not reform her in this respect: it was a fault which increased with age and foreign habits. Horace Walpole, who met her at Florence twenty years afterwards, draws a hateful and disgusting picture of her, as "old, dirty, tawdry, painted," and flirting and gambling with all the young men in the place. But Walpole is terribly satirical; he had a personal dislike to Lady Mary Wortley, whom he coarsely designates as _Moll Worthless_,--and his description is certainly overcharged. How differently the same characters will strike different people! Spence, who also met Lady Mary abroad, about that time, thus writes to his mother: "I always desired to be acquainted with Lady Mary, and could never bring it about, though we were so often together in London. Soon after we came to this place, her ladyship came here, and in five days I was well acquainted with her. She is one of the most shining characters in the world,--but shines like a comet: she is all irregularity, and always wandering: the most wise, most imprudent, loveliest, most disagreeable, best-natured, cruellest woman in the world!" Walpole could see nothing but her dirt and her paint. Those who recollect his coarse description, and do _not_ remember her letters to her daughter, written from Italy about the same time, would do well to refer to them as a corrective: it is always so easy to be satirical and ill-natured, and sometimes so difficult to be just and merciful!