The knowledge which she gathered respecting the habits and character of this people was minute, her mode of communicating it lively and entertaining. But Europe, in general, owes to her residence in Turkey a much more solid advantage than any such entertain ment. \Vhilst passing the summer months at Belgrade, not far from the shore of the Bosphorus, Lady Mary Lad occasion to observe a custom practised by the pea sants, which was said to guard them from the effects of small-pox, a dreadful, and, at that time, cureless mala dy. She examined the process of ingrafting, or inocu lation, as it was afterwards called, became convinced of its efficacy, and with a courage for which humanity is deeply indebted, she consented to have the operation tried upon her son, at that time about three years old. Edward NVortley Montagu, afterwards so celebrated for his rambling, eccentric character, sustained the experi ment, without hurt, in the month of March, 1718. The event encouraged his mother to form the hope of estab lishing a practice so salutary in her own country. It is well known that, after a lapse of some years, the zealous support which she bestowed on the attempts of Mr. Maitland, her physician, to introduce inoculation, on his return to England, was at length crowned with success. In 172!, government allowed five criminals to avoid the sentence of death, by submitting to this process ; the successful experiment was sanctioned by the College of Physicians ; inoculation obtained the pa tronage of the Royal Family, and had finally triumphed over all opposition, when, eighty years afterwards, the more precious discovery of Jenner promised entirely to extirpate the disorder.
Lady Mary was not long detained from the society of her friends in England. Mr. Wortley's conduct was approved of both by the Courts of St. James and Vien na; but, owing to the exorbitant demands of the latter, his negotiations entirely failed. His letters of recal, countersigned by Addison, are dated 21st October, 1717; and on the following 5th of June, he and his family com menced their journey to Britain, where, after visiting Tunis, Genoa, Lyons, and Paris, they arrived on the 30th of October, 1718.
At the Court of George I., Lady Mary was received with increased distinction. The celebrity arising from her travels, the fund of new ideas acquired in the course of them, the graphical and spirited mode in which she described what she had seen, gave a new charm to her already fascinating conversation. She obtained parti cular notice from the Princess of Wales, afterwards Queen Caroline, and by her brilliant acquirements ex cited the praise or the envy of every competitor for such honours as the admiration of a court can bestow. The excellence of her sprightly conversation had al ready been stamped by the approbation of Pope ; and at her return from Turkey, the poet appears to have manifested the continuance of that friendship which his lively, though rather affected letters, had so warmly expressed during her absence. He earnestly invited her to take up her residence at Twickenham, and had the pleasure of successfully negociating a lease of Sir God Frey Kneller's house for her reception. In this cele brated village, Lady Mary could occasionally exchange the gaieties of fashionable life at London for the com pany of those celebrated characters who frequented the society of Pope, and diversify the flatteries of Dr. Young
and her second cousin, Henry Fielding, by the conversa tion of Swift, Gay, and Arbuthnot.
But the friendship of wits is proverbially fragile. In the case of Pope and Lady Mary, its existence, render ed precarious by the conflicting claims of a vanity, which on both sides sought gratification in the dan gerous pro‘ince of satire, was shortened by political hostility. Dissatisfied with the quantity of praise which. the world bestowed on Popc for correcting her produc tions, and which the poet, it was thought, did not stea dily enough refuse, Lady Mary had for some time omit ted consulting him on such occasions ; and this coldness was increased at the accession of George II. by her avowed partiality for Sir Robert Walpole, and her inti macy with Lord Hervey, which could not but offend a professed follower of Bolingbroke. The publication of the Town Eclogues completed this alienation. Lady Mary had several years before submitted these poems to Pope's inspection, and as the satire or scandal they were supposed to contain rendered them an object of general curiosity, copies were extensively circulated, and to print them became a fit speculation for the noted Edmund Curl. In spite of remonstrances and threats, the work came out under Pope's name ; and Lady Mary, defrauded of praise, and suspecting collusion, not only renounced all intercourse with him, but displayed the resentment of forfeited friendship in bitter sarcasms, which were too faithfully reported to the object of them. The irritable nature of Pope was little calculated to brook such treatment. His opinion of Lady Mary, un der the name of Sappho, expressed in his satires with more rancour than taste or wit, called forth from his victim, and her coadjutor, Lord Hervey, also stigmatized under the name of Sporus, those " verses addressed to the translator of the first satire of the Second Book of Horace," the private circulation of which produced a letter from Pope to his antagonists, disavowing any such intention as the one imputed to him. Much has been said of the malignity displayed by Pope in this attack, and of the meanness with which he attempted to recede from it. Certainly the accusations brought against Sap pho are of a character sufficiently black, and the author's equivocal statements about their application seem to argue considerable weakness of mind ; but, if without in vestigating how far such accusations might be founded on truth, we condemn the man who, under the mask of a moralist, stoops to gratify his individual hatred, we arc compelled at the same time to admit, that his antago nists appear to have wanted the power rather than the will, to be equally barbarous. It is matter of regret, that the friendship of Pope and Lady Mary was con verted into enmity : but the means adopted by the one party to satisfy that enmity were hardly less blameable than those adopted by the other. A fierce, though dull execration of Pope's malice and deformity, is but awk wardly blended with censures of his virulence and coarseness.