SOURCE: "Verses Address'd to the Imitator of Horace: A Skirmish between Pope and Some Persons of Rank and Fortune," in Studies in Bibliography, Vol. 30, 1977, pp. 96-119.

[In the following excerpt, Grundy discusses the events surrounding the publication of Verses, compares various claims to authorship of the poem, and concludes that it was probably a cooperative effort for Montagu and her close friend Lord Hervey].

Pope's imitations of Horace take as grist to their mill the attacks of those writers rash enough to oppose him. Mr. J. V. Guerinot, cataloguing their attempts, considers only one 'a worthy adversary' to Pope, which caught something of his 'own satiric brilliance'. That one, the Verses Address 'd to the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, 1733, has been briefly discussed not only by Guerinot but also by Professor Robert Halsband in his lives of its confederate authors, Lord Hervey and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Much, however, remains to be told…. This article will give a short account of Lady Mary's previous attacks on Pope, of her denial of any connection with the Verses and Hervey's silence about them; it will then … analyse the evidence we have about authorship from contemporary and later opinion and from examination of the Verses themselves, and show the part which they later played in shaping some of Pope's own most brilliant attacking lines.

Pope published his First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated, on 15 Feb. 1733. He devoted some attention (lines 81-84) to his former friend Lady Mary, who had already crossed pens with him:

Slander or Poyson, dread from Delia's Rage,
Hard Words or Hanging, if your Judge be Page.
From furious Sappho scarce a milder Fate,
P-x'd by her Love, or libell'd by her Hate.

Lord Hervey, who was politically opposed to Pope's friends, but had offered no show of hostility in print, received only a glance of disparagement (lines 5-6):

The Lines are weak, another's pleas'd to say,
Lord Fanny spins a thousand such a Day.

There was, however, a common element in the two attacks, in that each aimed at the victim's activities as a writer. Lady Mary tried non-literary means to ensure Pope's future silence, first through Lord Peterborough and then through Sir Robert Walpole. Her first attempt met with humiliating failure; while the second was still under discussion she must have turned back to the idea of verse retaliation.

Despite its rashness and its liability to the charge from Pope of 'fulfilling the veracity of my prophecy', this idea was not new to Lady Mary. After Pope's thrust in the Dunciad, 1728 (ii. 127-128):

(Whence hapless Monsieur much complains at Paris Of wrongs from Duchesses and Lady Mary's),

she had begun work on a mock-epic counterblast. Its action takes place before Queen Anne's death: Dullness, aided by Prophanation, Obscænity and in an early version Cloacina, has settled (anachronistically) in a certain grotto beneath a muddy road: she plots to reverse the national educative process being carried out by Addison; each goddess supports her own candidate for leadership of their forces, and the young Pope is chosen as commander in preference to Swift, Gay, and Arbuthnot [as found in Essays and Poems and Simplicity, a Comedy, edited by R. Halsband and I. Grundy, 1977, revised ed. 1993]. Lady Mary had re-worked the material of Pope's masterpiece and copied his tone with some skill. She had also enlisted her cousin Henry Fielding, at that time a very young writer looking for patronage, as ally. He too, loyally rather than personally indignant, had attacked the Dunciad in Dunciad-like fragments, related to hers, the draft of which he left with her. The subject-matter of this epic story makes it hard to see how either Fielding's or Lady Mary's part could ever have been finished, let alone printed. Any satisfaction which she derived from this counter-attack must have remained private.

After Pope's new offensive of 1733, Fielding composed his sympathetic 'Epistle to Mr Lyttleton, occasioned by two Lines in Mr Pope's Paraphrase on the first Satire of the 2d Book of Horace', either at Lady Mary's prompting or on his own initiative. Again he left the manuscript with her; again it remained unpublished. Meanwhile, however, as contemporary opinions about the Verses to the Imitator suggest, Lady Mary struck up the same sort of alliance with Lord Hervey that she had previously had with Fielding. No record of this remains among her letters: the following account comes from other sources than herself. She denied any part in the Verses, saying two years later that they had been written '(without my knowledge) by a Gentleman of great merit, whom I very much esteem, who [Pope] will never guess, and who, if he did know, he durst not attack'. This denial, sent to Arbuthnot the day after the publication of Pope's Epistle to him, can be ignored as a desperate defensive stroke in her mortal combat with Pope. If it is incredible, so are Pope's denials to Peterborough and to Hervey: that he 'never applied that name [Sappho] to her in any verse of mine, public or private; and, I firmly believe, not in any letter or conversation.' Neither of the two enemies could be trusted to speak truth of the other.

Lady Mary cannot be proved a liar. As her biographer writes, 'no documentary evidence survives to prove [her] authorship of the Verses'. No copy in her hand is now known, either in the Harrowby Manuscripts Trust with the bulk of her papers, or elsewhere. Her great-grandson and editor, Lord Wharncliffe, claimed that the poem was 'contained in the collection of poems verified by Lady Mary's own hand as written by her'; and this was repeated by a later editor and a biographer. Yet the surviving album verified by Lady Mary in this way, Harrowby MS 256, shows no sign of anything having been removed from it. Either a copy of the Verses was once lodged, though not bound, in the album, and has since vanished; or a whole volume of Lady Mary's manuscripts, also verified by her hand, has similarly disappeared; or Lord Wharncliffe was entirely mistaken.

Hervey also says nothing of the poem in his surviving letters (which do not, however, include those he wrote to Lady Mary); but he is linked with it by documentary evidence, which will be discussed in detail later. He made two sets of corrections, differing slightly from each other: to a scribal copy now in the British Museum and to a printed copy now at Ickworth, Suffolk. He also wrote a manuscript preface 'To the Reader', assuming rather than claiming authorship, now bound inside the Ickworth copy which he called 'corrected by the Author'; it is the closest we have to an assertion of literary ownership. He refrained from asserting the same thing elsewhere. He mentioned The First Satire of the Second Book without annoyance two days after its publication. Early in 1734, à propos his Epistle From a Nobleman to a Doctor of Divinity, he told Arbuthnot he was sorry 'to enter into a Paper-War' with Pope, apparently not expecting Arbuthnot to reply that he had entered already. In letters he gloried in his severity on Pope, but only the severity of An Epistle, which he disclaimed in the press and discussed at length with his correspondents. Where Lady Mary protests too much, Hervey protests less than might be expected….

[The] next possible source for evidence of authorship is contemporary and later critical opinion. The Verses seem to have been identified as Lady Mary's from the first, and Hervey's contribution recognized only later. Two of the four early transcripts ascribed them to her [so did contemporary hands in copies of Dodd's first, 5th, and 6th editions (Texas)]. On 8 March, the day of publication, Pope wrote to Fortescue of 'that Lady's having taken her own Satisfaction in an avowed Libell'; this sounds more sincere than his later suggestion that he considered the Dodd title-page ascription, 'By a Lady', to be her deliberate confession of authorship. Two days later Theobald told Warburton that Pope had been 'most handsomely depicted in a severe Poem by Lady Mary W. Mountague'. On [18] March Pope again wrote of the 'Libel' as hers alone; he did not link Hervey's name with hers until 2[0] April. Irish opinion also believed the Verses were 'certainly hers'. Voltaire (who never mentioned the Verses in his letters to Hervey) seems to have asked for them as Lady Mary's in early May 1733 [Voltaire, Corr., edited by Theodore Besterman, ii, 1969, 333].

Her authorship was again assumed three weeks after publication by whoever was responsible for printing the Answer to Hammond's Elegy as 'By a LADY, Author of the Verses to the Imitator of HORACE.' (Dodsley's Collection, however, reprinting the Answer as Hervey's, thereby implied his authorship of the Verses too.) Hervey himself kept a copy of the Elegy and Answer (now bound with his copy of the Verses at Ickworth), but he made no mark in it as he did in the other pamphlets collected in this volume as his.

Hostile squadrons gathering against the Verses had no doubt whom to attack. A Proper Reply to a Lady, 'By a Gentleman' (3 April), began with the question of authorship:

What Lust of Malice, what salacious Spite
'Gainst her Alcaeus Sappho moves to write?
It must be Sappho,—Who can chuse but guess
Whence springs this clam'rous Womanish Address?

This 'Gentleman' not only detected feminine ignorance of razors in lines 25-26, but amply hinted at Lady Mary's identity, mentioning her poetry and the scandal over her deranged sister. Another combatant, the 'Gentlewoman' who printed at her own expense her Advice to Sappho (received by Lord Oxford on 12 April [Badminton MSS Fm T/B1/4.4; Bod. M. 3. 19. Art.]), made it clear that her quarry was Lady Mary. An unympathetic commentator in MS agreed. On the other side, the anonymous author of 'In Defence of Lady Mary Wortley' described how 'Ingenious Wortley draws her conq'ring Pen.'

By 2[0] April Pope had heard more of the complicated story of 'Lady M—'s or Lord H—'s performance…. it was labour'd, corrected, præcommended and post-disapprov'd, so far as to be dis-own'd by themselves, after each had highly cry'd it up for the others'. On the first of May Swift wrote of the authors as 'they', not knowing whether 'the production you mention came from the Lady or the Lord'. In any case he was not impressed:

I did not imagine that they were at least so bad versifyers, Therefore, facit indignation versum [sic: he must have seen a copy of the second Dodd edition], is only to be applyed when the indignation is against general vilany, and never operates when a vilian writes to defend himself. I love to hear them reproach you for dulness; Onely I would be satisfied, since you are so dull, why are they so angry?

Thereafter, opinions continued uncertain or ambiguous—none more so than Pope's own in his Letter to a Noble Lord, 30 Nov. 1733. Here he began with a clear statement of Lady Mary's responsibility: 'I wonder yet more, how a lady, of great wit, beauty, and fame for her poetry … could be prevailed upon to take a part in that proceeding.' Further on he implied that her denial of authorship, brought to him by Lord Peterborough, had caused him to change his mind about her part in the Verses; but this he almost immediately contradicted, in a passage famous for suggestiveness rather than for precision:

Your Lordship indeed said you had it from a lady, and the lady said it was your Lordship's; some thought the beautiful bye-blow had two fathers, or (if one of them will hardly be allowed a man) two mothers; indeed I think both sexes had a share in it, but which was uppermost, I know not. I pretend not to determine the exact method of this witty fornication.

Pope never again admitted to believing Lady Mary's disclaimer. He continued to couple her with Hervey as authors of unworthy libels against him, either as 'some Persons of Rank and Fortune' or by name. By this time Hervey had struck again in his Epistle From a Nobleman to a Doctor of Divinity ; Pope did not make it clear whether he was blaming Hervey for that alone, or for a share with Lady Mary in the Verses.

More than a year after the Verses were published, a third name was added to those of the suspected authors. Lord Oxford wrote on his copy of the first Dodd edition, 'The Authors of this poem are Lady Mary Wortley, Lord Harvey and Mr Windham under Tutor to the Duke of Cumberland and married to my Lady Deloraine'. Since William Windham married Lady Delorain only in April 1734, Oxford's identification was written more than a year after the Verses were published—very likely at the same time that he annotated his copy of the 'Fifth Edition', January 1735. Despite this time-lag Windham is a plausible third collaborator. His courtship of Lady Delorain (the 'Delia' Pope linked with 'Sappho') provided ample grounds for reprisals by him. He might be the esteemed gentleman whom Lady Mary considered Pope would not guess or dare to attack—a description by that time entirely unfitted to Hervey, who had just been trounced as Sporus. A Letter to a Noble Lord mentions 'your friend W—m'. Professor Maynard Mack has argued that Windham's marriage and his part in the Verses are glanced at in the Epistle to Arbuthnot:

To please a Mistress, One aspers'd his life;
He lash'd him not, but let her be his Wife.

Lord Oxford may have been simply following this same reasoning, or he may have had positive information. His wife was a close friend of Lady Mary, and their daughter the Duchess of Portland (whose transcript of the Verses, ascribed to Lady Mary, has already been mentioned) an equally close friend of Lady Mary's daughter. The paragraph in the Verses beginning

Not even Youth and Beauty can controul
The universal Rancour of thy Soul

was taken by W. J. Courthope to be a tribute to Lady Mary, but is more appropriate to Lady Delorain, who was eleven years younger. These lines, if no others in the Verses, may well be Windham's contribution. If he took a larger part, it seems odd that it attracted such slight and tardy notice.

Later attributions of the Verses followed one or other contemporary view. In 1768 Isaac Reed, editing Lady Mary's Poetical Works, reprinted them from the Monthly Review, 1767, without suggesting that she was not sole author. Lady Mary's son quoted the Verses as hers. James Dallaway, first editor to be allowed by her family to use her papers, mentioned that the poem was 'said to have been the joint performance' of her and Hervey [in Jonathan Curling, Edward Wortley Montagu (1954), 208]. J. W. Croker, who edited Hervey's Memoirs, decided on the basis of the manuscript evidence that Hervey wrote it—but decided against his own critical judgement, for he found it

smoother, keener, and in every way better than any of Lord Hervey's single-handed productions—except (if that be one) the 'Answer' to Hammond. … a marked superiority over Lord Hervey's other works, both in vigour and polish—

and especially over An Epistle From a Nobleman. W. J. Courthope found in the poem various characteristics of Hervey (triplets, enjambement, lack of cæsura), but also 'greater vigour than is usually found in Lord Hervey's style, which, when he uses metre, is, as a rule, mean and dull' A modern critic finds An Epistle 'inferior to the Verses, lacking the crack and sparkle which frequently distinguish' them. Halkett and Laing's Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous Literature ascribes the Verses to Lady Mary (rev. ed., 1926-43). Hervey's most recent editor gives as 'the accepted view' that she wrote them, possibly with Hervey's help. His biographer, wittily elaborating Pope's paradoxes, finds in the poem 'a crude vitality and masculine robustness more characteristic of Lady Mary … than it is of Hervey, most of whose verse is monotonously fluent and nerveless', and concludes it to be hers.

It still remains to analyse the poem more closely and to compare it in some detail with others by each writer. This analysis will confirm the view of Lady Mary's dominance, but with some qualifications. The opening of the Verses is strongly Herveyesque: antitheses as thick as bees o'er vernal blossoms, and six lines of subordinate clauses (in most of Lady Mary's poems the first main verb occurs in the first or second line). On the other hand the extended climactic image occupying the last paragraph has many parallels among her verse, while Hervey usually prefers to end with a detached, pointed couplet. If genuine collaboration went into the Verses, then the influence of each contributor enabled the other to surpass his or her usual level. They have none of the prolixity which was Hervey's besetting sin, and little of the careless syntax and construction which was Lady Mary's. She seldom uses 'thou' and 'thee' with so few lapses into 'you'. The balance of lines and couplets (especially in the series of antitheses at lines 93-100) is more exactly judged than is usual in any but short passages of her writing. Hervey was certainly no fonder of triplets than she was; but while his generally enclose their sense within the three lines in the approved manner, she treated this device in more cavalier fashion, often making the third line introduce a new idea or lead hurriedly on towards the following couplet, as it does in all the triplets of the Verses except the first.

In content the poem reflects sometimes one author, sometimes the other. The sneer at Pope's classicism in the first paragraph expresses an attitude which Hervey (like Fielding) consistently took towards him: that of one who has enjoyed the classical education proper to a gentleman. In his revisions to the Verses and also in later attacks, Hervey accuses Pope of inability to appreciate the ancients; in An Epistle From a Nobleman he laments the increasing rustiness of his own classical learning, with a polite air of deprecating a grace which in fact his correspondent knows him to possess. This poem, like the Verses (line 4), compares Pope to his disadvantage with the 'ancient Sense' which Hervey felt himself better equipped to savour.

The Verses's admission (line 96) that many people had formerly prized Pope's work possibly reflects the fact that Lady Mary, who never liked his satires, had once deeply admired his pre-Dunciad poems. By 1728 she had lost her admiration sufficiently to call them 'smooth unmeaning Rhime'; perhaps a contrast with that smoothness is implied in the Verses, line 19: 'none thy crabbed Numbers can endure'. Hervey made no distinctions as to chronology when attacking Pope's work.

The reference (Verses, line 61) to physical weakness as 'The Female Scold's Protection in Offence' would read oddly coming from Lady Mary. So would the gibe at Pope as one who may legitimately be beaten since he 'cannot fight' (line 62), which may imply a contrast with Hervey's surprisingly bold conduct in his duel with Pulteney in 1731. The threat of inflicting punishment is in itself harder to assign; there are innumerable parallels in other people's pamphlet attacks on Pope, and some elsewhere in Hervey's and Lady Mary's writings. Hervey had mentioned late in December 1731, and again in January 1733, the likelihood of physical chastisement for Pope: on the first occasion he seems to have been quoting a phrase of Lady Mary's, as reported by Horace Walpole; on the second he used, like the Verses, line 65, the word 'cudgel'. This passage goes on to depict Pope escaping actual punishment ('Limbs unbroken, Skin without a Stain, / Unwhipt, unblanketed, unkick'd, unslain'), as does the concluding line of Lady Mary's 'P[ope] to Bolingbroke', written after An Essay on Man: 'You scape the Block, and I the Whipping-Post'. The effect in both poems is that of a barely-suppressed rather than a direct threat.

The Verses contain no unique accusations, only those repeated elsewhere by Hervey, Lady Mary, Fielding, and others. Yet some distinctions may be drawn. Pope wrote of the Verses:

'Tis a pleasure & a comfort at once to find, that with so much mind, as so much Malice must have to accuse or blacken my character, it can fix upon no one ill or immoral thing in my Life; & must content itself to say my Poetry is dull, & my Person ugly.

Insofar as this is accurate, it suggests a contrast with Lady Mary's other verse attacks on him, which fix on a large number of specific if unjust moral charges: superstition, obscenity, profaning religion, unfairness to Addison, Tickell, Lintot, Walpole, and Mme Dacier; toad-eating, cheating subscribers, causing bad blood between husband and wife, boasting of fictious amatory exploits, and having the clap. From the beginning, and increasingly with time, she points at Pope's personality rather than his writing, abusing his 'Father, Mother, Body, Soul' as well as 'Muse' with more inclusiveness and particularity than Hervey. Oddly, in view of the latter's career, her attacks outside the Verses are more politically angled than his; they present Pope linked with Bolingbroke and others, a poison working in the body of the state, while Hervey presents him as an obscure private lampooner.

Hervey also moves away from the literary towards the personal in his attacks, but never becomes so specific in his personalities as Lady Mary. His Epistle From a Nobleman, devoting only part of its space to attacking Pope, singles out poor translation and plagiarism. His prose Letter to Mr. C-b-r, 1742, reproves Cibber for attacking 'nothing but his Morals, which no body defends', and goes on to criticise his poetry. The Difference between Verbal and Practical Virtue, published a few days later, says that Pope should be castigated for 'that worse Deformity, his Mind', mentioning specifically literary faults as well as vindictiveness, lying, and ingratitude. Of the major ideas of the Verses, that of Pope as inhuman is more characteristic of Lady Mary; that of his verse as unintentionally innocuous is more like Hervey.

In their plan the Verses differ from Lady Mary's other poetic attacks. Those are all cast in dramatic form, involving more than one character (Dullness, her 'subservient Pow'rs', and the Scriblerians; Swift and a prostitute; Pope and Bolingbroke), whereas Hervey always chooses to argue directly in his own person, like an orator speaking for the prosecution. The Verses come closer to his method, though the fact that they are addressed to Pope, like an epistle, gives them greater immediacy of attack than an address to a third party, and they are not without dramatic characterization.

Hervey undoubtedly made use of the Verses' second paragraph,

Thine is just such an Image of his Pen,
As thou thy self art of the Sons of Men:
Where our own Species in Burlesque we trace,
A Sign-Post Likeness of the noble Race;
That is at once Resemblance and Disgrace,

nine years later in The Difference Between Verbal and Practical Virtue:

But whilst such Features in his Works we trace,
And Gifts like these his happy Genius grace. …
It seems the Counterpart by Heav'n design'd
A Symbol and a Warning to Mankind:
As at some Door we find hung out a Sign,
Type of the Monster to be found within.

But the image of Pope's body as sign and type of his mind weakens the fearsome image of his body as a signpainter's travesty of a man. Later and inferior re-workings are not evidence either for or against authorship; but it is of some interest that Hervey's The Difference re-works many ideas from the Verses and weakens almost all of them. For instance, it reduces to a run-of-the-mill accusation of impotence the force of 'the gross Lust of Hate' (Verses, line 30) and 'No more for loving made, then to be lov'd (Verses, line 49), and in making a statement of the suitability of Pope's mind to his body misses half the point of Verses, lines 50-51:

It was the Equity of righteous Heav'n,
That such a Soul to such a Form was giv'n.

These details add up to a real and important difference between the pictures which the two poems present. The Difference takes the form of a general essay on the failure of poets to practise what they preach: Pope, though likened to a monster, to Domitian, to 'some yelping Mungril', remains recognisably an actual writer, who has faults which Horace, Seneca and others had, only worse. Despite the shrill tone which is de rigueur among Pope's antagonists, it remains a rational argument, as does that part of An Epistle From a Nobleman which deals with Pope. (Hervey points out in An Epistle that Pope has mangled 'what Homer thought', which is a derogatory opinion; Lady Mary in 'P[ope] to Bolingbroke' makes him refer casually to himself as 'The Homer, and the Horace of the Age', which is a dramatization.) Though the Verses do not, like other works by Lady Mary, present Pope as a developed fictional character, they go further than Hervey's in transforming the raw material which he represents.

The first paragraph of the Verses, perhaps Hervey's, is entirely logical if one accepts its premises. Thereafter, nonrational suggestion takes over. The images of the poem cluster round several central ideas: that of Pope as nonhuman, which the sign-post image introduces; that of his works as instruments of hurt, a whole catalogue of which succeed each other between lines 21 and 37, and 73 and 88; that of unavailing effort in 'Weeds, as they are, they seem produc'd by Toil', 'doubly bent to force a Dart', the lines on beauty, 'rancorous Will', 'stings and dies' and 'try at least t'assassinate' (all of which assert the opposite of Pope's own claim to Horatian ease); and that of oneman warfare against the rest of mankind. This idea dominates the poem, steadily growing in importance and incidentally producing some fine lines ('The Object of thy Spleen is Human Kind', line 33; 'To Thee 'tis Provocation to exist', line 35). As an enemy to mankind (and first of all to women), Pope is linked with Milton's Satan in his later, ignoble stages, Whether snake, porcupine or wasp, he is something the surrounding human beings look at with wonder and contempt. At last he becomes the outcast homicide Cain. One can see how indispensable to the design is the most offensive aspect of the poem, the use it makes (from the second paragraph to the last couplet) of Pope's deformity.

Whether or not it is true, as J. V. Guerinot thinks, that 'the experience of years of friendship, possibly of love … made it possible for Lady Mary to wound deepest of all', it is true that the Verses inflict some wounds which are almost caressing. There is insulting pity in 'thy poor Corps' (line 91), in 'wretched little Carcass' and 'angry little Monster' (lines 70 and 76), and in lines 81-82 (surely Lady Mary's, since Hervey struck them out in both his copies):

One over-match'd by ev'ry Blast of Wind,
Insulting and provoking all Mankind.

This glimpse of embattled mock-pathos is vivid enough to oppose to self-portraits of the heroic satirist; yet despite hints of pathos or even amusement, the Pope created in the Verses is a creature whom in the end it is appropriate to banish with Old-Testament rigour.

The Verses make comparatively little effort to take up points from the First Satire of the Second Book. One might expect Hervey to look for debating points, or Lady Mary to be provoked by its celebration of Pope's friends, 'Chiefs out of war, and statesmen out of place', since they were her habitual targets in polemical verse. But all is subordinated to the substitution of the imaginary pest for the real man or for the modest crusader depicted in the Satire. Where the Verses do allude to specific lines it is always on this point of self-portraiture. Their 'if thou drawst thy Pen to aid the Law' (line 64) refers to the Satire's passage, lines 105ff.:

What? arm'd for Virtue when I point the Pen,
Brand the bold Front of shameless, guilty Men. …

The second of these two lines also suggested the image of Pope's deformity as the brand 'Mark'd on thy Back, like Cain, by God's own Hand'. Line 84, 'To make those tremble who escape the Law', paraphrases Pope's claim in his line 118. Immediately afterwards, lines 85-86,

Is this Ridicule to live so long,
The deathless Satire, and immortal Song?

refer to Pope's seeing the victim of his satire in his lines 79-80:

Sacred to Ridicule! his whole Life long,
And the sad Burthen of some merry Song.

This distorts Pope's claim by over-stating it and ignoring its irony and humour.

Pope surpassed his attackers in turning their weapons back upon themselves. Five years later he took 'But Horace, Sir, was delicate, was nice' from the Verses, line 16: 'Horace can laugh, is delicate, is clear'. He may also have recalled 'none thy crabbed Numbers can endure' (line 19) when he wrote in the Epistle to Arbuthnot that 'Congreve lov'd, and Swift endur'd my Lays' (line 138). But of all his re-workings of the lines of others against him, laying them low with words from their own mouths, the most striking is the Sporus portrait (Arbuthnol, lines 305-333), which can be seen as virtually a composite portrait of the two collaborators.

In the Sporus passage the Verses seem to live a ghastly resurrected life. One of their accusations is re-animated in 'florid Impotence', one of their techniques alluded to in 'vile Antithesis'. Pope used their comparison of himself (line 55) with 'the Snake of Eve' for 'at the Ear of Eve, familiar Toad'. 'This painted Child of Dirt that stinks and stings' has its source in 'as we're told of Wasps, it stings and dies' (Verses, line 88). He was already fond of insectimagery, but his identification of Sporus-Hervey with butterfly and bug acquires an extra force from the Verses' use of this very image. Indeed, for readers—let alone the writers—of the Verses, an additional layer of meaning informs this passage. No wonder if on the publication of Pope's epistle someone 'supposed that some copies would be called for'. The poem had acquired notoriety as an assault on Pope of which 'Your Lordship indeed said you had it from a lady, and the lady said it was your Lordship's'. Although 'both sexes had a share in it', the lady, more sorely provoked and more poetically inventive, probably had the greater. Yet the lord was taking public acknowledgement and blame. The Sporus portrait, already rich with complex allusions to Hervey's sexual reputation, his influence on Queen Caroline, the behind-the-scenes nature of his court and pamphlet politics, acquires a new level of significance through the unacknowledged place in it of Lady Mary. Like Walpole she speaks through Hervey's mouth, like the Queen she is corrupted by him:

The sexual innuendoes of A Letter to a Noble Lord can be seen as a preliminary draft for this portrait, clumsy in comparison with the finished product.

The authors of the Verses had put up a fierce fight, but the champion was not to be worsted. He gave Hervey what is probably the most memorable of all his satirical lashings; he allowed Lady Mary (like'her own later imagined version of himself) to escape the public whipping-post. In private she was not exempt. Pope deflected the weighty blow of the Verses' closing lines by skilful paraphrase:

It appears that he was not blind to the element of insulting pity in the poem, for he took up that weapon and with that too proved himself the victor:

The annals of poetic warfare can hardly show a finer example of wounding, as the Verses have it (line 26), 'with a Touch, that's scarcely felt or seen.'