“ As Lady Mary was then in her sixty-third year, the scandalous interpretation put on the matter by Horace Walpole may safely be discarded. Her husband spent his last years in hoarding money, and at his death in 1761 is said to have been a millionaire. His extreme parsimony is satirized in Pope’s Imitations of Horace (2nd satire of the 2nd book) in the portrait of Avidieu and his wife. Her daughter Mary, countess of Bute, whose husband was now prime minister, begged her to return to England. She came to London, and died in the year of her return, on the 21st of August 1762. ”

“ She was disfigured by a painful skin disease, and her sufferings were so acute that she hints at the possibility of madness. She was struck with a terrible “fit of sickness” while visiting the countess Palazzo and her son, and perhaps her mental condition made restraint necessary. ”

“ She asked a third person to remonstrate, and received the obvious answer that Pope could not have foreseen that she or any one else would apply so base an insult to herself. Verses addressed to an Imitator of Horace by a Lady (1733) , a scurrilous reply to these attacks, is generally attributed to the joint efforts of Lady Mary and her sworn ally, Lord Hervey. She had a romantic correspondence with a Frenchman named Rémond, who addressed to her a series of excessively gallant letters before ever seeing her. ”