Page:The lives of celebrated travellers (Volume 2).djvu/95

 Mary—who seems to have thought that women are never virtuous except when kept within the pale of duty by the fear of imminent danger—"you may easily imagine the number of faithful wives very small in a country where they have nothing to fear from a lover's indiscretion!" Had we met with so profligate an article of faith in the creed of a male traveller, we should have inferred that he had spent the greater part of his life in gambling-houses and their appendages; but since it is a lady—an ambassadress—an illustrious scion of a noble stock, who thus libels the posterity of Eve, we place our finger upon our lips, and keep our inferences to ourselves.

Pope, in a letter to her at Adrianople, accompanying the third volume of his translation of the Iliad, pretends, as a graceful piece of flattery, to imagine that because she had resided some few weeks on the banks of the Hebrus among Asiatic barbarians, and barbarized descendants of the Greeks, she could doubtless throw peculiar light upon various passages of Homer; and the lady, interpreting the joke seriously, replies, that there was not one instrument of music among the Greek or Roman statues which was not to be found in the hands of the Roumeliotes; that young shepherd lads still diverted themselves with making garlands for their favourite lambs; and that, in reality, she found "several little passages" in Homer explained, which she "did not before entirely comprehend the beauty of."

During her stay at Adrianople she discovered something better, however, than Turkish illustrations of Homer, for it was here that she first observed the practice of inoculation for the small-pox, which she had the hardihood to try upon her own children, and was the first to introduce it into England. Among the Turks, who, in all probability, were not its inventors, it was termed ingrafting, and