“ The malicious caricature of Sporus does Hervey great injustice, and he is not much better treated by Horace Walpole, who in reporting his death in a letter (14th of August 1743) to Horace Mann, said he had outlived his last inch of character. Nevertheless his writings prove him to have been a man of real ability, condemned by Walpole’s tactics and distrust of able men to spend his life in court intrigue, the weapons of which, it must be owned, he used with the utmost adroitness. ”

“ Pope’s reply was a Letter to a Noble Lord, dated November 1733, and the portrait of Sporus in the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot (1735) , which forms the prologue to the satires. Many of the insinuations and insults contained in it are borrowed from Pulteney’s libel. ”