Pope, who was the most irritable of men, never forgot or forgave even the most trifling offence.  Lady Bolingbroke truly said of him that he played the politician about cabbages and salads, and everybody agrees that he could hardly tolerate the wit that was more successful than his own.  It was about the year 1725, that he began to hate Lord Hervey with such a hatred as only he could feel; it was unmitigated by a single touch of generosity or of compassion.  Pope afterwards owned that his acquaintance with Lady Mary and with Hervey was discontinued, merely because they had too much wit for him.  Towards the latter end of 1732, ‘The Imitation of the Second Satire of the First Book of Horace,’ appeared, and in it Pope attacked Lady Mary with the grossest and most indecent couplet ever printed:  she was called Sappho, and Hervey, Lord Fanny; and all the world knew the characters at once.

In retaliation for this satire, appeared ’Verses to the Imitator of Horace;’ said to have been the joint production of Lord Hervey and Lady Mary.  This was followed by a piece entitled ’Letter from a Nobleman at Hampton Court to a Doctor of Divinity.’  To this composition Lord Hervey, its sole author, added these lines, by way, as it seems, of extenuation.

Pope’s first reply was in a prose letter, on which Dr. Johnson has passed a condemnation.  ‘It exhibits,’ he says, ’nothing but tedious malignity.’  But he was partial to the Herveys, Thomas and Henry Hervey, Lord Hervey’s brothers, having been kind to him—­’If you call a dog Hervey,’ he said to Boswell, ‘I shall love him.’

Next came the epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, in which every infirmity and peculiarity of Hervey are handed down in calm, cruel irony, and polished verses, to posterity.  The verses are almost too disgusting to be revived in an age which disclaims scurrility.  After the most personal rancorous invective, he thus writes of Lord Hervey’s conversation:—­

His wit all see-saw between this and that—­
Now high, now low—­now master up, now miss—­
And he himself one vile antithesis.

* * * * *

Fop at the toilet, flatterer at the board,
Now trips a lady, and now struts a lord. 
Eve’s tempter, thus the rabbins have expressed—­
A cherub’s face—­a reptile all the rest. 
Beauty that shocks you, facts that none can trust,
Wit that can creep, and pride that bites the dust.’

‘It is impossible,’ Mr. Croker thinks, ’not to admire, however we may condemn, the art by which acknowledged wit, beauty, and gentle manners—­the queen’s favour—­and even a valetudinary diet, are travestied into the most odious offences.’

Pope, in two lines, pointed to the intimacy between Lady Mary and Lord Hervey:—­

    ’Once, and but once, this heedless youth was hit,
     And liked that dangerous thing, a female wit.’

Nevertheless, he afterwards pretended that the name Sappho was not applied to Lady Mary, but to women in general; and acted with a degree of mean prevarication which greatly added to the amount of his offence.