It is to be presumed that Lady Mary, or her daughter, Lady Bute,
destroyed these collections. For her part, Lady Mary returned letters
that she had received from Lord Hervey, but only those that belonged to
the last fourteen years of an acquaintance that had endured twice so
long. These are for the greater number platonic in character, although
there are a few phrases of a freer kind. Croker, who edited Lord
Hervey's _Memoirs_, mentions that Hervey, answering one of her letters
in 1737, in which she had complained that she was too old to inspire
passion, after paying a compliment to her charms more gallant than
decorous, said: "I should think anybody a great fool that said he liked
spring better than summer merely because it is further from autumn, or
that they loved green fruit better than ripe only because it was further
from being rotten. I ever did, and believe ever shall, like women best--

"Just in the noon of life--those golden days,
When the mind ripens as the form decays."

Lady Mary was then in her forty-ninth year, being six years Hervey's
senior.

Lady Louisa Stuart, writing in 1837--that is, seventy-five years after
the death of her grandmother, Lady Mary--wrote indignantly of the
attacks that had been made upon her ancestress. "The multitude of
stories circulated about her--as about all people who were objects of
note in their day--increase, instead of lessening, the difficulty," she
said. "Some of these may be confidently pronounced inventions, simple
and purely false; some, if true, concerned a different person; some were
grounded upon egregious blunders; and not a few upon jests, mistaken by
the dull and literal for earnest. Others, again, where a little truth
and a great deal of falsehood were probably intermingled, nobody now