She can, however, scarcely have been led into any self-deception as regards the sincerity of her correspondent, in spite of the fact that in one of the earliest epistles he addressed to her he subscribed himself: "I am, with all unalterable esteem and sincerity, Madam, your most faithful, obedient, humble servant." Yet, no doubt, she was pleased enough to read: "I communicated your letter to Mr.Congreve; he thinks of you as he ought, I mean as I do, for one always thinks that to be just as it ought....

We never meet but we lament over you: we pay a kind of weekly rites to your memory, when we strew flowers of rhetoric and offer such libations to your name as if it were a profaneness to call toasting." Well, alcoholic refreshment by any other name is just as potent.

It must have been grateful and comforting to be told when in exile: "I must tell you, too, that the Duke of Buckingham has been more than once your high priest in performing the office of your praises: and upon the whole I believe there are few men who do not deplore your departure, as women that sincerely do." Most excellent Pope, who would play at make-believe.

It is almost a pity that he could not persuade the lady that he meant even a tithe of what he wrote to her.

Listen to him again: "For my part, I hate a great many women for your sake, and undervalue all the rest.