Much pleased with this letter, he preserved it; and, when Lady Mary came to England, showed it to Lady Bute desiring she would ask leave for him to visit her mother.
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.