accusations, first in Pope's writings, and is believed to be alluded to in the line,

"Who starved a sister or denied a debt."

It seems to have originated in disputes between Lady Mary and the family of Lady Mar as to the custody of Lady Mar during her lunacy. Lady Mary appears always to have regarded her sister's husband with aversion. His marriage took place at a time when the Tory party, with whom Lord Mar had finally connected himself, were in the height of their power; and it must have been distasteful to all Lady Mary's family and connexions. Mar was

a man of a peculiarly artful and designing character. He played through all his life something more than a double part, and met the common fate of such a policy. By the Jacobites, whose cause he was accused, sometimes unjustly, sometimes justly, of having betrayed, he was distrusted. The Whigs, whom he secretly served in his adversity, set him to the basest tasks, and cheated him of his reward. Lady Mar, from her being a daughter of the Duke of Kingston, and the facility with which she was permitted by the government to go to and fro between England and the Continent, was always regarded by her husband's friends with extreme suspicion, and she could have had little sympathy with them. During the period embraced by the section of Lady Mary's correspondence with her-1721-1727-she resided with her husband in Paris. The only letter from her which I have found, dwells much upon domestic trouble, and is written in a melancholy and desponding tone. She appears to have lived unhappily with her husband, and, "in the beginning of her illness," is said by Lord Grange, the brother of the Earl of Mar, to have declared "loudly and oftener than once," that "her husband's bad usage had turned her mad." A ruse was probably resorted to by her family in England, through the influence which they had with the government, for removing her from her husband's custody in Paris after her madness was declared: for when he permitted her to be taken to England, he was evidently under the impression that he would be allowed to follow her. The permission, however, was withheld. He had, in fact, by his treachery, altogether lost his influence with the Jacobite party, and having now nothing more to betray, was no longer valued by King George's government. He died a few years afterwards at Aix-laChapelle.

It is hardly to be wondered at that the efforts made by Lord Grange to obtain the custody of his brother's wife, in preference to her sister Lady Mary, met with the most strenuous resistance from the latter. Grange was a man of determined character, who did not scruple at an act of lawless violence. His forcible detention of his wife, Lady Grange, for many years in lonely confinement in the island of St. Kilda, is a well-known romance in real life. His letters and diary exhibit a curious mixture of theological cant, whining complaints, and unscrupulous designs. For Lady Mar, of whom he knew but little, he did not pretend to have, and could not have, any particular regard. The motives for his conduct in the matter are, indeed, fully betrayed in his private letters to his relative, Thomas Erskine of Pittodry, published in the third volume of the Miscellany of the Spalding Club; from which it clearly appears that it was not the continuance of Lady Mar's madness, so much as the consequences of her recovery, which he regarded with dread. "If Lady M―r continue in her confinement," he writes, "and matters as they are, it is bad enough; but they may be worse.” "Supposing the sister find her well," he adds, "then may not an artful woman impose on one in such circumstances, and whose mind cannot yet be very firm?" What this means is explained by other passages in the same letter, in which he shows by elaborate statements, the importance to his brother and his family of obtaining a command over her actions, particularly as to an arrangement already made concerning her property. "Were Lady M―r, on her freedom, in right hands," he remarks, “she would ratify the bargain; but if in her sister's, probably she will not. If while she is that way Lord M. [Mar] comes to die, it is too probable that his daughter will fall into the same hands, which would go near to finish the ruin of the family. I shall add little more on this head. The expense is uneasy at any rate. If the lady be got to freedom, and then to the settlement we wish, it will cost money; but it is worth it; and if it make not a return in profit, yet it prevents worse."

It may be supposed that Lord Grange, though he made a journey to London on this business, failed to persuade the Lord Chancellor of the justice of his claim to take charge of Lady Mar. All the schemes to which he resorted for obtaining his object proved unavailing; and he at length adopted the characteristic measure of forcibly seizing the unhappy lady, and carry

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ing her to Scotland. On the road, he informs us, she was arrested by the Lord Chief Justice's warrant, 'procured on false affidavit of her sister Lady Mary, &c., and brought back to London, declared lunatic, and by Lord Chancellor (whose crony is Mr. Wortley, Lady Mary's husband) delivered into the custody of Lady Mary." It was but in the preceding year that Grange had, in like manner, conveyed away his wife. She was seized in the night by a party of Highlanders, and thenceforth devoted to a secret and dreary imprisonment, from which she only escaped by her death, more than thirteen years afterwards. What might have been the fate of Lady Mar in the hands of this man, he has himself sketched in a curious passage which he puts into Lady Mary's mouth, in an imaginary conversation between herself and her sister. Quite separated from your father's and mother's friends and from your country," he supposes Lady Mary to say, "locked up in Scotland, or foreign parts, and wholly in their [Lord Grange and his adherents'] power, what can you expect? Your friends here could give you no relief, and you should be wholly at the barbarous mercy of those whose sense get [gets ?] not sufficiently the better of their hatred or contempt as to make them carry with seeming respect to you till they get you in their power. What will they not do when they have you?"

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It is a striking instance of the recklessness of Pope's satire, that he appears to have had no authority for his accusation but the statements of this man. That Lady Mary ill-used or 66 starved her favourite sister, was a charge not likely to be conceived in the mind of any one else but Grange, and which no one else had any interest in making; and the fact that he appears to have induced Pope's friend, Dr. Arbuthnot, on one occasion to enter into his plans, would certainly point to a channel through which Pope might have received this strange statement. Among the papers is a letter from Mr. Wortley to Lady Mary, written some time later, in which he recommends her, for her own ease, to relinquish her charge, and urges upon her that she has "done all that any one can think reasonable " for her sister's sake-that Lady Frances Erskine, the daughter of Lady Mar, being now "almost a woman, ought to choose for herself who should preserve her mother's life; " and that, "if she had not the prudence to choose proper persons," Lady Mary "could not be blamed." Lady Mary appears to have yielded

to these arguments, and Lady Frances Erskine thenceforth took charge of her mother. Lady Frances subsequently married her cousin, the son of Lord Grange, and naturally adopted the spirit of her husband's family: but Lady Mar appears to have had no share in their hostility. To the last, Lady Mary continued to write to her occasional letters from Italy, in the hope of their finding her in one of those intervals of recovered reason in which she, on one occasion at least, replied in a letter of kindness and sisterly affection.

The reader is probably sufficiently wearied of these discussions, but there is one more such story to the examination of which some space is devoted in the appendix to the edition of 1837, and which cannot be passed over here. The following is Lord Wharncliffe's statement of the matter:

"In the 'Letters from Horace Walpole to Sir Horace Mann,' lately published, and which were edited by the late Lord Dover, there are two passages1 relating to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu which require some notice, in order that the real state of the facts to which they refer may be known, as far as possible.

"The first of these is to be found in Letter 231, dated Mistley, August 31, 1751, and is in these words: 'Pray, tell me if you know anything of Lady Mary Wortley: we have an obscure story here of her being in durance in the Brescian or the Bergamesco; that a young fellow whom she set out with keeping has taken it into his head to keep her close prisoner, not permitting her to write or receive any letters but what he sees: he seems determined, if her husband should die, not to lose her as the Count [Richcourt] lost my Lady O.' [Orford]. And in the next letter he again alludes to this report.

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Among Lady Mary's papers there is a long paper, written in Italian, not by herself, giving an account of her having been detained for some time against her will in a country-house belonging to an Italian count, and inhabited by him and his mother. This paper seems to be drawn up either as a case to be submitted to a lawyer for his opinion, or to be produced in a court of law. There is nothing else to be found in Lady Mary's papers referring in the least degree to this circumstance.

It

1 One of these passages refers to M. Rémond, whose story is already discussed.

would appear, however, that some such forcible detention as is alluded to did take place, probably for some pecuniary or interested object; but, like many of Horace Walpole's stories, he took care not to let this lose anything that might give it zest, and he therefore makes the person by whom Lady Mary was detained, a young fellow whom she set out with keeping.' Now, at the time of this transaction taking place, Lady Mary was sixty-one years old. The reader, therefore, may judge for himself, how far such an imputation upon her is likely to be founded in truth, and will bear in mind that there was no indisposition upon the part of Horace Walpole to make insinuations of that sort against Lady Mary."

The hatred of Horace Walpole towards Mr. Wortley and Lady Mary, which exhibits itself in the bitter and malignant spirit of all his allusions to them, had other grounds than those to which the writer of the Biographical Anecdotes alludes. In his judgments upon those who had walked the political stage somewhat earlier than the commencement of his own career, Horace Walpole had frequently but one standard of vice and virtue. The opponents of his father, Sir Robert, rarely found favour in his writings. In moments of calm reflection he was himself not unconscious of this bias; but he was probably unaware of the extent to which his veneration for the memory of a father, certainly not over fond or indulgent towards him, gave colour to his opinions. But Mr. Wortley had rendered himself particularly odious to Walpole; and that Lady Mary, though once friendly with him, had imbibed her husband's spirit, is manifest in allusions to Walpole in her poems, no less than in her fragmentary sketch of the Court of George the First, which she appears to have written late in life. In the latter period of Sir Robert Walpole's career, when that power so long maintained was tottering, this antagonism was still more conspicuous. The few of Mr. Wortley's speeches delivered at this period which have been preserved, are all attacks upon Sir Robert; but it was in the hour of Walpole's disgrace, when an insult would be more keenly felt than ever, and when young Horace, just entered upon the scene, found his father's popularity and influence at an end, that Mr. Wortley assailed the falling minister in an invective which could never have been forgiven. The occasion was Mr. Sandys' motion for the removal of Walpole, and Mr. Wortley concluded his speech by moving