'Tis you who are to blame, and may God revenge it upon you, with all those blessings and earthy prosperities which the divines tell us, are the cause of our perdition: for if He makes you happy in this world, I dare trust your own virtue to do it in the other." These poets! Lady Mary took all this in the right way, and as love-letters appraised them at their true value.

"Perhaps you'll laugh at me for thanking you very gravely for all the obliging concern you express for me," she wrote from Vienna in September, with, perhaps, just a touch of irony.

"'Tis certain that I may, if I please, take the fine things you say to me for wit and raillery; and it may be, it would be taking them right.

But I never in my life was half so well disposed to believe you in earnest; and that distance which makes the continuation of your friendship improbable, has very much increased my faith for it, and I find that I have (as well as the rest of my sex), whatever face I set on't, a strong disposition to believe in miracles." As regards the rest, her side of the correspondence was matter-of-fact to such a degree that it suggests that she adopted that tone in order to lease him.

Her replies can scarcely have given Pope any satisfaction.