A Lady of the Last Century

Garrick and His Wife

Photogravure from the painting by Wm. Hogarth

A Lady of the Last
Century

BY
JOHN DORAN, LL. D.

PUBLISHED BY
FRANCIS A. NICCOLLS & CO.
BOSTON

ÉDITION DE LUXE.

Limited to One Thousand Copies.

No. ....

TO
Andreas J. G. Holtz, Esq.
(TWYFORD ABBEY)
THIS “BIT OF MOSAIC” IS DEDICATED, WITH SENTIMENTS
OF THE MOST SINCERE ESTEEM AND
CORDIAL REGARD.

Preface

In the year 1809, Mr. Matthew Montagu published the first two of four volumes of letters of his aunt, Elizabeth Montagu. He was not only her nephew, he was also her adopted son and her executor. On the 5th of December in that year, the celebrated statesman, William Windham, was reading those volumes, “in the evening, up-stairs;” and he subsequently recorded the following judgment of them in his diary: “I think very highly of them. One of their chief merits is series juncturaque. Nothing can be more easy and natural than the manner in which the thoughts rise one out of the other, even where the thoughts may appear rather forced, nor is the expression ever hard or laboured. I see but little to object to in the thoughts themselves, but nothing can be more natural or graceful than the manner in which they are put together. The flow of her style is not less natural, because it is fully charged with shining particles, and sparkles as it flows.”

In 1813, Mr. Matthew Montagu published two more volumes of his aunt’s correspondence. The press generally received them with pleasant testimony of approval. It not only endorsed the judgment of the eminent statesman quoted above, but it especially pointed out that the letters were genuine and authentic, which could not be said of a similar collection of letters then challenging the censure of the town. Mrs. Montagu’s letters were read with great avidity, and readers for the most part came to the same conclusion as the statesman and the critics.

The last letter in the series is addressed to Mrs. Elizabeth Carter. The date is September, 1761. The writer lived nearly forty years after that date. During that time, she maintained a lively correspondence; her letters were copied and circulated. After her death, a few, with fragments of others, found their way into various periodicals. The correspondence which Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu kept up with her sister-in-law, Mrs. Robinson, wife of the Rev. William Robinson, and a few other friends, between 1761 and the close of the last century, was long in the possession of the late Mr. Richard Bentley, who purchased them at a sale of autographs. These form the chief portion of the present volume.

In a note to the letters published by Mr. Montagu, the editor states that they are “intended to convey in them the biography of the writer, which the editor thinks he could not so well exemplify by any remarks of his own as by the letters themselves.” Mr. Montagu gave to his aunt’s readers every word of every epistle, from the salutation to the signature.

From the letters now printed for the first time there have only been omitted vain repetitions, formal compliments, and the nothings that may have once been somethings, but which are now mere dust and ashes, from which little of value is to be sifted. There have been retained all that could further “convey the biography of the writer,” with addition of such anecdotal illustration from the printed letters and from contemporary records as might serve to show more completely the character and surroundings of a Lady of the Last Century.

Contents

List of Illustrations

A Lady of the Last Century

CHAPTER I.

Elizabeth Robinson, who became so well known, subsequently, as Mrs. Montagu, belongs altogether to the eighteenth century. She was born at York, in October, 1720. She died in the last year of that century, 1800. Miss Robinson was of a family, the founder of which, William Robinson, a London merchant, but a descendant of a line of Scottish barons, bought, in 1610, the estate of Rokeby, in Yorkshire, from Sir Thomas Rokeby, whose ancestors had held it from the time of the Conquest. Her father, Matthew Robinson, was an only son of a cadet branch of the Robinsons. He was a member of the University of Cambridge, where he wooed the Muses less ardently than he did Miss Elizabeth Drake, a beautiful heiress, whom he married when he was only eighteen years of age. The very young couple settled at Edgeley, in Yorkshire; but the husband (owner, through his wife, of more than one estate in the country) preferred the shady side of Pall Mall to fields of waving corn or groves vocal with nightingales.

Of the twelve children of this marriage, seven sons and two daughters survived their youth. The daughters, Elizabeth and Sarah, were endowed with the same literary tastes. Sarah wrote the more books, but Elizabeth is the better remembered. The church, the law, politics, and commerce attracted one or other of the sons.

In 1730, the head of the elder branch of the Robinsons, Thomas, was created a baronet. He was that famous Long Tom Robinson of whom so many well-known stories are told. Chesterfield slightly touched him in an epigram, and Walpole seldom referred to him without a sarcasm. At the coronation of George the Third, Sir Thomas was mock Duke of Normandy, who, with an equally English and mock Duke of Aquitaine, was supposed to indicate that the King of England was as much King of France, by the grace of God, as he pretended to be. Long Sir Thomas was so truly an Englishman that he went to France, and into French society, in his hunting-suit. A satirical French abbé, hearing his name and looking at his marvellous attire, gravely asked him if he were Robinson Crusoe.

Long Sir Thomas Robinson sold Rokeby to the Morritts in 1769. When he died, in 1777, his title went to his next surviving brother, Richard. This Richard was an English clergyman, who, in 1731, had commenced a successful career in Ireland, as chaplain to two viceroys, and he was successively Bishop of Killala, of Leighlin and Ferns, and of Kildare. Finally, he was raised to the dignity of Archbishop of Armagh, primate of Ireland. In the year that Sir Thomas died, Richard was created an Irish peer, Baron Rokeby of Armagh, with remainder to Mrs. Montagu’s father, Matthew Robinson. The father did not live to succeed to the title, but his son Matthew did. The present Lord Rokeby is Mrs. Montagu’s great grandnephew, and was born when she was yet living, A. D. 1798. The first lord figures largely in this lady’s letters. His good works made him popular in Ireland, which his Grace found to be a fine country to live out of, as much as was, more or less, consistent with duty. He was one of the best-known characters at Bath during successive seasons; he also suffered much from the gout; but he endured with alacrity all the port and claret that were necessary to keep it out of his archiepiscopal stomach.

Thus much for Mrs. Montagu’s family. She derived from it a certain distinction; but she enjoyed greater advantage, for a time at least, from the marriage of her maternal grandmother, who took for her second husband the learned and celebrated Dr. Conyers Middleton. Doctor Middleton’s home was at Cambridge, where a few of Miss Robinson’s youthful years were profitably and curiously spent.

Curiously—from the method which the biographer of Cicero took with the bright and intelligent girl. Among the divines, scholars, philosophers, travellers, men of the world who were, together or in turn, to be met with at Doctor Middleton’s house, the figure of the silent, listening, and observant little maid was always to be seen. Her presence there was a part of her education. Doctor Middleton trained her to give perfect attention to the conversation, and to repeat to him all that she could retain of it, after the company had dispersed. When she had to speak of what she did not well understand, Doctor Middleton enlightened his little pupil. This process not only filled her young mind with knowledge, but made her eager in the pursuit of more.

How readily she received impressions at an early age, and how indelibly they were stamped on her memory, she has herself recorded. “One of the strongest pictures in my mind,” she wrote to Lord Lyttelton, in 1759, “is the funeral of a Dean of York, which I saw performed with great solemnity in the cathedral, when I was about four years old. Whether the memory of it, added to the present objects, may not have made the place appear the more awful to me, I do not know; but I was never so affected by any edifice.” She loved York, and in her early Yorkshire home the plan of education went far in advance of the views, and perhaps of the powers, of family governesses. Masters, as well as mistresses, were there for the instruction of both sons and daughters; but Elizabeth’s father sharpened and stimulated her intellect by encouraging her to make smart repartees to his own witty or severe judgments. In this cudgelling of brains Matthew had great delight till he found that his daughter was too much for him at his most favourite weapons. Matthew then bit his lips, and ceased to offer challenge or give provocation.

Matthew Robinson’s wife seems to have been educated according to the traditions of a school founded in 1673 for the purpose of raising women to the dignity and usefulness which distinguished their ancestresses. The lady, Mrs. Makin, who originated this school for English maidens, stated her object in an essay, of which a few words may be said, as illustrative of a system of female education in England which, founded nearly half a century before Elizabeth Robinson was born, had not lost all its influence till after she herself was to be reckoned among learned young ladies. The work in question was called “An Essay to revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen in Religion, Manners, Arts, and Tongues: With an Answer to the Objections against this way of Education.” In the dedication to the Lady Mary, daughter of James, Duke of York, the author says: “The barbarous custom to breed women low is grown general amongst us, and hath prevailed so far, that it is verily believed that women are not endowed with such reason as man.” Of old, Mrs. Makin says, women were highly educated; but now, “not only learning, but virtue itself, is scorned and neglected as pedantic things, fit only for the vulgar.” The remedy enjoined for this matter is thus stated: “Were a competent number of schools erected to educate Ladies ingeniously, methinks I see how ashamed men would be of their ignorance, and how industrious the next generation would be to wipe off the reproach!” The author adds: “Let not your Ladyship be offended that I do not, as some have wittily done, plead for female preëminence. To ask too much, is the way to be denied all.”

To prove that women were formerly educated in arts and tongues, the author names a score and more of Greek, Roman, and other ladies celebrated for their proficiency in those respects.

“How,” asks the author, “could the Sibyls have invented heroic, or Sappho ‘sapphick,’ or Corinna have thrice beaten Pindar at lyric verses, if they had not been highly educated?” And to prove that the young ladies of both Greece and Rome were instructed in all kinds of good literature, the writer refers to a learned duel between twenty ladies a side, from each nation, in which the Grecian women came off the better in philosophy, and the Roman superior in oratory.

As instances of admirably educated English women, the following persons are named, with much eulogistic comment:

The Lady Jane Gray. The “present Duchess of Newcastle, who, by her own genius, rather than any timely instruction, overtops many grave Gown-men.” The Countess Dowager of Huntingdon, a pupil of Mrs. Makin’s; “well she understands Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, and Spanish,” and “what a proficient she is in arts subservient to Divinity, in which (if I durst, I would tell you) she excels.” The Princess Elizabeth, daughter to King Charles the First, to whom Mrs. Makin was tutoress, “at nine years old, could write, read, and in some measure understand Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, and Italian: had she lived, what a miracle she would have been of her sex. Mrs. Thorold, daughter of the Lady Car, in Lincolnshire, was excellent in philosophy, and all sorts of learning. I cannot, without injury, forget the Lady Mildmay and Doctor Love’s daughters: their worth and excellency in learning is yet fresh in the memory of many men.” Finally, as the greatest sample of all, the author describes Queen Elizabeth at some length, who, “according to Ascham, read more Greek in a day than many of the doctors of her time did Latin in a week.”

In the Postscript to the above essay, the following passages occur:

“If any enquire where this education may be performed, such may be informed that a school is lately erected for Gentlewomen, at Tottenham High Cross, within four miles of London, on the road to Ware, where Mrs. Makin is governess, who was formerly tutoress to the Princess Elizabeth, daughter to King Charles the First. Where, by the blessing of God, Gentlewomen may be instructed in the Principles of religion, and in all manner of sober and virtuous Education: more particularly in all things ordinarily taught in other schools.

“The other half to be employed in gaining the Latin and French tongues; and those that please may learn Greek and Hebrew, the Italian and Spanish: in all which this Gentlewoman hath a competent knowledge.

“Gentlewomen of eight or nine years old, that can read well, may be instructed in a year or two (according to their parts) in the Latin and French tongues; by such plain and simple Rules, accommodated to the Grammar of the English tongue, that they may easily keep what they have learned, and recover what they shall lose; as those that learn Musick by Notes.

“Those that will bestow longer time may learn the other languages aforementioned, as they please.

“Repositories also for Visibles shall be prepared; by which, from beholding the things, Gentlewomen may learn the Names, Natures, Values, and Use of Herbs, Shrubs, Trees, Mineral-pieces, Metals, and Stones.

“Those that please may learn Limning, Preserving, Pastry, and Cookery.

“Those that will allow longer time may attain some general knowledge in Astronomy, Geography, but especially in Arithmetick and History.

“Those that think one language enough for a Woman, may forbear the Languages, and learn only Experimental Philosophy, and more or fewer of the other things aforementioned, as they incline.

“The Rate certain shall be £20 per annum: But if a competent improvement be made in the Tongues, and the other things aforementioned, as shall be agreed upon, then something more will be expected. But the parents shall judge what shall be deserved by the Undertaker.

“Those that think these Things Improbable, or Impracticable, may have further account every Tuesday, at Mr. Mason’s Coffee-house, in Cornhill, near the Royal Exchange; and Thursdays, at the ‘Bolt and Tun,’ in Fleet Street, between the hours of three and six in the afternoon, by some person whom Mrs. Makin shall appoint.”

Mrs. Makin’s school, under herself and her successors, and her system, adopted by imitators, had good influences in their “little day.” Those influences continued beyond that period in families like that of Mrs. Robinson, where every variety of knowledge was accounted valuable. It was a period when grace of carriage was held by others to be as necessary as a well-stored mind; and very popular in some English households was a little volume from the French, called “The Art of being Easy at all Times and in all Places, written chiefly for the use of a Lady of Quality.”

In the Robinson family, personal grace came naturally; but the mind was cultivated. Indeed, in that household, the wits were not allowed to rust. It was the delight of those bright girls and boys to maintain or to denounce, for the sport’s sake, some particular argument set up for the purpose. Occasionally the pleasant skirmish would develop into something like serious battle. The triumphant laugh of the victor would now and then bring tears to the eyes of the vanquished. At such times there was a moderator of the excited little assembly. The mother of the young disputants sat at a table close at hand. She read or worked; sometimes she listened smilingly, sometimes was not without apprehension. But she was equal to the emergency. Her children recognised her on such occasions as “Mrs. Speaker;” and that much-loved dignitary always adjourned the house when victory was too hotly contested, or when triumph seemed likely to be abused.

It is hard to believe that Elizabeth Robinson, who was the liveliest of these disputants, assumed or submitted to the drudgery of copying the whole of the Spectator, when she was only eight years of age. Her courage and perseverance, however, were equal to such a task; but her energies were often turned in another direction. She was as unreservedly given to dancing, she tells us, as if she had been bitten by a tarantula. She as ardently loved fun—“within the limits of becoming mirth”—as she devotedly pursued learning.

“My mind used to sleep,” she writes to Lord Lyttelton, “eight or ten hours without even the visitation of a dream, and rose in the morning, like Aurora, throwing freshness and joy on every object, tricked itself out in sunbeams, and set in gay and glowing colours.” With a head furnished with knowledge beyond that possessed by most girls of her age; with feet restless and impatient to join any dance anywhere; she had a heart most sisterly and tenderly attuned to love for, and sympathy with, her brothers. “I have seven of them,” she wrote, while she was yet in her teens, “and would not part with one for a kingdom. If I had but one, I should be distracted about him. Surely, no one has so many or so good brothers.” This is only one out of a score of such testimonies of sisterly affection.

There are some significant traces of the effects of this lady’s early training in the letters which she wrote from the time she was twelve years of age till she had reached her twenty-second year, when she married. These letters were addressed to a friend older than herself, Lady Margaret Cavendish Harley, who, in 1734, became Duchess of Portland. They are sprightly and forcible, but they are not “girlish.” In one of the earliest, written at Horton, near Hythe, Kent (one of the estates which Matthew gained by his marriage), she says: “My papa is a little vapoured, and last night, after two hours’ silence, he broke out into a great exclamation against the country, and concluded by saying, that living in the country was sleeping with one’s eyes open. He has ordered me to put a double quantity of saffron in his tea.” For what purpose this remedy was ordered, may be guessed from a passage in a comedy of Charles the Second’s time, by Howard. “Saffron-posset-drink is very good against the heaviness of the spirits,” says Mrs. Arbella, in “The Committee.”

Young Miss Robinson was fond of illustrating her early letters by images taken from life, and set up after the fashion of popular novelists. One of these figures occurs in a letter addressed to the Duchess of Portland, in May, 1734, when the lively writer had not yet completed her fourteenth year: “I am surprised that my answer to your Grace’s letter has never reached your hands. I sent it immediately to Canterbury, by the servant of a gentleman who dined here; and I suppose he forgot to put it in the post.... If my letter were sensible, what would be its mortification, that, instead of having the honour to kiss your Grace’s hands, it must live confined in the footman’s pocket, with greasy gloves, rotten apples, mouldy nuts, a pack of dirty cards, and the only companion of its sort—a tender epistle from his sweetheart, ‘tru till Deth;’ perhaps, by its situation, subject to be kicked by his master every morning, till at last, by ill-usage and rude company, worn too thin for any other use, it may make its exit by lighting a tobacco-pipe.”

The young writer of the above was not only remarkably observant of all that passed around her, but generally showed her reading by a quotation that should give force to the description of what she observed. Thus, in writing to her dear duchess, who had been suffering from fever (A. D. 1734), Miss Robinson remarks: “I shall put on as musty a face at your Grace’s fever as Miss W—— could make at the face of Doctor Sandys, to describe the horror of which would require at least as tragic a bard as Lee; for then she would look, good gods! how she would look!” This may smack of priggishness; but there was nothing of that, nor of false prudery, in Elizabeth Robinson’s character. Before she was fifteen, she had some experiences not likely to fall to the lot of young ladies of the present day. “I have in winter,” she writes to Mrs. Anstey, “gone eight miles to dance to the music of a blind fiddler, and returned at two o’clock in the morning, mightily pleased that I had been so well entertained.” Indeed, young ladies seem to have been thoroughly emancipated, and to have been abroad in the “wee sma’ hours ’ayont the twal,” enjoying all the perils consequent on such rather wild doings. In 1738, when our young lady was not quite eighteen, she went, with two of her brothers and her sister, eight miles to the play, from her Kentish home; and she tells the Duchess of Portland, “After the play, the gentlemen invited all the women to a supper at the inn, where we stayed till two o’clock in the morning, and then all set out for our respective homes.” The frolicsome damsel adds, “Before I had gone two miles, I had the pleasure of being overturned, at which I squalled for joy.” It was, perhaps, this indulgence in fun and late hours, joined to much solid reading, that made this youthful reveller and student hate early morning hours as she hated cards. But her “quality” was favourably shown in her ready observance of the law and custom of the house in which she happened to be a sojourner. There is no better proof than this of what is understood by “good breeding.” She would rather have gone down to breakfast at noon than at nine; but if the breakfast-hour of her entertainers was at eight, there was the young guest at table, fresh as the rose and brighter than the dawn. She amusingly illustrated this matter once, by writing from a house where she was tarrying, “Six o’clock in the morning; New Style.”

In fact, few things came amiss to her. No doubt she preferred Mary-le-bone Gardens to those at Edgeley or at Horton. She was happy in both, but happier in the fashionable gardens nearer London; for Mary-le-bone was still out of town. Elizabeth Robinson’s day is described, on one of these occasions, as breakfasting in Mary-le-bone Gardens at ten; giving a sitting to Zincke after midday, for her well-known miniature portrait as Anne Boleyn; and spending the evening at Vauxhall. At the nobility’s private balls given in the first-named suburban paradise, Elizabeth Robinson was amongst the gayest and fairest of the revellers. Before the dance began in those days the ladies’ fans were thrown upon a table, and the men then drew them for partners, each taking for his own the lady to whom the fan which he had drawn, and which he presented to her, belonged. It was not all breakfasting and dancing in those gardens. There was a large plunging-bath there, much used by fashionable Naiads, who rose from silken couches, donned a bathing-dress, took headers into the waters, gambolled in and under them till they were breathless, and then went home to dress for other enjoyments. When the Duchess of Portland heard of her young friend’s plunging delights, she expressed herself “frightened out of her wits.” But, on the other hand, Lord Dupplin wrote a couple of verses on this particular Naiad, and in honour of the poet, the laughing nymph again and again took headers into the glad waters of Mary-le-bone.

The home scenes of her life in the country come out strong in contrast with those of her life in London. In a lively sketch of one of these scenes, drawn for the duchess’s amusement, the youthful artist thus joyously describes herself and her doings:

“One common objection to the country is, one sees no faces but those of one’s own family; but my papa thinks he has found a remedy for that, by teaching me to draw; but then he husbands these faces in so cruel a manner, that he brings me sometimes a nose, sometimes an eye, at a time; but on the king’s birthday, as it was a festival, he brought me out a whole face, with its mouth wide open.” In another letter, she says: “I would advise you not to draw old men’s heads. It was the rueful countenance of Socrates or Seneca that first put me out of conceit with it. Had my papa given me the blooming faces of Adonis and Narcissus, I might have been a very apt scholar; and when I told him I found their great beards difficult to draw, he gave me St. John’s head in a charger. So, to avoid the speculation of dismal faces, which, by my art, I dismalised ten times more than they were before, I threw away my pencil. If I drew a group of little figures, I made their countenances so sad and their limbs so distorted, that from a set of laughing Cupids, they looked like the tormented infants in Herod’s cruelty, and smiling, became like Rachel weeping for her children.” After more in this strain, she calls herself the best hospital painter; “for I never drew a figure that was not lame or blind, and they had all something of the horrible in their countenances ... you would have thought they had seen their own faces in the glass.”

Her failure in the above respect at home found ample compensation in success at Tunbridge Wells, at Bath, and at country races, at all of which Elizabeth Robinson’s beauty attracted all eyes; her vivacious wit charmed or stung all ears. At these places, she studied life quite as much as she enjoyed its pleasures; and she could not go down a dance at the Wells or at “The Bath,” without making little mental epigrams on the looks of newly married people, the manners of lovers, and the doings of eccentric folk. These found their way, in writing, to her ducal friend, who had already bestowed on the restless maiden the nickname of “La Petite Fidget.”

At Bath, she was as restless, as observant, and as epigrammatic as at Tunbridge Wells. She describes Bath life, in 1740, as consisting all the morning of “How d’ye does?” and all night of “What’s Trumps?” The women, in the “Ladies’ Coffee House,” talk only of diseases. The men, “except Lord Noel Somerset, are altogether abominable. There is not one good; no, not one.” Among the lady eccentrics, was a certain dowager duchess, who, said Miss Robinson, “bathes, and, being very tall, had nearly drowned a few women in the Cross Bath; for she had ordered it to be filled till it reached her chin; and so all those who were below her stature, as well as her rank, were obliged to come out or drown.”

The glance thus obtained into the Bath itself only gives, as it were, a momentary view of the fashionable people in those fashionable waters. They who compare old accounts with what is now to be seen will agree that he who looks, at the present day, into the dull, dark, and simmering waters can have no conception of the jollity, frolic, riot, dissipation, and indecorum which once reigned there. There was a regular promenade in the waters, and the promenaders were of both sexes. They were in bathing-costumes, and walked with the water nearly up to their necks. The heads of the shorter people appeared to be floating. At the same time, they were frolicking, or flirting, or otherwise amusing themselves. Those who came for sanitary purposes were hanging on by the rings in the wall, and were sedulously parboiling themselves. The Cross Bath was the famous quality bath. Handsome japanned bowls floated before the ladies, laden with confectionery, or with oils, essences, and perfumery for their use. Now and then one of these bowls would float away from its owner, and her swain would float after it, bring it again before her, and, if he were in the humour, would turn on his back and affect to sink to the bottom, out of mere rapture at the opportunity of serving her. The spectators in the gallery looked on, laughed, or applauded till the hour for closing came. Therewith came half-tub chairs, lined with blankets, whose owners plied for fares, and carried home the steaming freight at a sharp trot and a shilling for the job.

Elizabeth Robinson’s friendship with Lord Lyttelton is well known. At a court assembly, at St. James’s, in 1740, the gentleman in question was present. He was then plain Mr. Lyttelton, son and heir of Sir Thomas, and about a year over thirty. The young lady observed him in the brilliant scene more closely and more approvingly than she did others. “The men were not fine,” she writes to her Grace; but she makes exception. “Mr. Lyttelton was, according to Polonius’ instruction, rich, not gaudy; costly, but not exprest in fancy.” In her eyes and to her mind, he was a perfect gentleman and scholar. “Mr. Lyttelton has something of an elegance in all his compositions, let the subject be ever so trifling.... Happy is the genius that can drink inspiration at every stream and gather similes with every nosegay.” Alas! the elegance of the last century embraced much that was otherwise. The present Lord Lyttelton would not dare to read aloud to a company of ladies and gentlemen the once popular and elegant poem which his ancestor addressed to Belinda!

In the days here referred to, there were two circumstances to which all maidens looked forward as their probable but not equally desirable lot, namely, marriage and the smallpox. The latter fell on Elizabeth Robinson’s sister Sarah, when the family were resident at Horton, near Hythe. The elder sister was sent to a neighbouring gentleman farmer’s, so called solely because he tilled a few acres of his own. Here, the Iphigenia aroused unwonted sympathies in the breast of the Squire Cymons. She would have nothing to do with furthering the humanising process of those dull and thirsty clods. Their scarlet waistcoats did not impress her like Mr. Lyttelton’s birthday suit at court. One heaving swain, she thought, would make an admirable Polyphemus! He stared at her just as the calves did; but the calves had instinct enough not to say anything to her. They were preferable to the squire, to whom the young girl, with her bright intellect, could not be persuaded “to lend out her liking on land security.” There is a world of meaning in what she wrote on that occasion to her correspondent: “I liked neither him nor myself any better for all the fine things he said.” She was a creature not to be wooed or won by a tippling, foxhunting clown, rich in the possession of dirt. She had finely strung sensibilities, which would not attune themselves to “the loud laugh which speaks the vacant mind.” Mrs. Pendarves, who saw much of her in the town and country mansions of the Duchess of Portland, recognised the above fact. “Fidget,” she wrote, in the year last named, “is a most interesting creature; but I shall not attempt to draw a likeness.... There are some delicate touches that would foil the skill of a much abler artist than I pretend to be.”

Just then her fears for her sister were even stronger than her antipathies for her Kentish lovers. In order to satisfy her eagerness to be assured that the sister she loved was out of danger, the latter was allowed to walk veiled into the fields, within speaking distance of the other. Veiled, because she had cruelly suffered, and it was thought better not to shock the elder sister by a sight of the devastation which the foul disease had worked temporarily on the beauty of the younger. Thus, the sisters stood, for a brief time, speaking all that love and hope suggested, and the sound of the convalescent sister’s voice fell like delicious music on the heart of the listener.

With renewed health came uninterrupted happiness, and gay mingling in gay society, and audacity of expression when describing it. Elizabeth Robinson had felt almost as much contempt for the fops among the soldiers of her day, as disgust for the country Polyphemuses who made her wrathful with their wooing. Very severe was she on “the scarlet beaux,” who were ordered to Flanders. “I think,” she says, “they will die of a panic and save their enemies’ powder. Well! they are proper gentlemen. Heaven defend the nunneries! I will venture a wager Flanders increases in the christenings more than in the burials of the week.”

In describing changes in fashion, she makes singular application of her historical knowledge. In 1741, she wrote to her sister, from town: “I do not know what will become of your fine shape, for there is a fashionable make which is very strange. I believe they look in London as they did in Rome after the Rape of the Sabines!”

As this fair young Elizabeth remembered her history on one occasion, so did she show on another that she had not forgotten her church catechism. “As for modern marriages,” wrote the lady, just then going out of her teens, “they are great infringers of the baptismal vow; for it is commonly the pomps and vanities of this wicked world on one side, and the sinful lusts of the flesh on the other.”

There are traces throughout Miss Robinson’s early letters of how it went with her own heart and its sympathies. In her eighteenth year, she wrote to the Duchess of Portland: “I never saw one man that I loved.” She added to this assertion such an endless list of virtues, merits, qualities, etc., which she expected to find in that happy individual, as to lead to the conclusion that a monster so faultless would never be created. She even half-acknowledged as much; for she wrote, “I am like Pygmalion, in love with a picture of my own drawing; but I never saw an original like it in my life. I hope when I do, I shall, as some poet says, find the ‘statue warm.’” In her nineteenth year, she gave utterance to a pretty petulance in these words: “I wish some of our neighbours had married two and twenty years ago; we should have had a gallant young neighbourhood; but they have lost time, and we have lost lovers by that delay.” To a remark of her sister’s, that, if she were not heedful, some handsome fool would win her in spite of herself, she replied, that, to win her heart, “it must be rather fair-spoken than fair-faced.” She was not much moved when rivals in beauty passed into the married state before her. In 1741, there are the following autobiographical details in letters to the wife of the Reverend Mr. Freind, of Canterbury: “I saw some fine jewels that are to adorn my fair enemy, Mrs. S——. I beheld them without envy, and was proud to think that a woman who is thought worthy to wear jewels to adorn her person, should do me the honour to envy and hate me.... Surely, of all vanities, that of jewels is the most ridiculous; they do not even tend to the order of dress, beauty, and cleanliness; for a woman is not a jot the handsomer or cleaner for them.” And again: “I am confined again by a little feverishness. I thought, as it was a London fever, it might be polite, so I carried it to the Ridotto, court, and opera, but it grew perverse and stubborn, so I put it into a white hood and double handkerchief, and kept it by the fireside these three days, and it is better; indeed, I hope it is worn out. On Saturday, I intend to go to Goodman’s Fields, to see Garrick act ‘Richard the Third’ that I may get one cold from a regard to sense. I have sacrificed enough to folly, in catching colds at the great puppet-shows in town.”

Subsequently, she would have her friend’s husband believe that she was another fair vestal of the west, who meant to pass through the world in maiden meditation, fancy-free. She writes to the Reverend Dean of Canterbury: “I have lately studied my own foibles, and have found that I should make a very silly wife and an extremely foolish mother, and so have as far resolved as is consistent with deference to reason and advice, never to trouble any man or to spoil any children.” This was but banter. Only the year before, her sister having made a jest of her love for heroes of antiquity, Elizabeth Robinson oracularly answered, “I believe I shall do my errand before many people think; but prudence shall be my guide. A living man,” exclaims the wise virgin, “is better than a dead hero!”

In 1741, this decided young lady was wooed by a fashionable lover, and also by a noble lover who was her senior by a good many years. The former was dismissed, and the young lady wrote to her sister in the above year: “Poor M. B. takes his misfortune so to heart, that I really pity him; but I have no balsam of heartsease for him. If he should die, I will have him buried in Westminster Abbey, next to the woman who died with the prick of a finger, for it is quite as extraordinary; and he shall have his figure languishing in wax, with ‘Miss Robinson fecit,’ written over his head. I really compassionate his sufferings and pity him; but though I am as compassionate, I am as cold as charity. He pours out his soul in lamentations to his friends, and all—

‘But the nymph that should redress his wrong,

Attend his passion, and approve his song!’

... I am glad he has such a stock of flesh to waste upon.... I am really quite fat; and if there were not some hope that I might get lean again, by raking in town, I should be uneasy at it. I am now the figure of ‘Laugh-and-be-fat,’ and begin to think myself a comely personage. Adieu! Supper is on table.”

And the saucy nymph “really did her errand” before many thought. She declined the offer of the man of fashion, and said “Yes” to the suit of the older scholar and gentleman.

The practical conclusion came in due time. In the Gentleman’s Magazine for August, A. D. 1742, there is the record of eleven marriages. Four of them saucily chronicle the fortunes of the brides. Among the other seven may be read this brief announcement: “August 5, Edward Montagu, Esq., member for Huntingdon, to the eldest daughter of Matthew Robinson, of Horton, in Kent, Esq.”

CHAPTER II.

Edward Montagu was the son of Charles, who was the fifth son of the first Earl of Sandwich. He was a well-endowed gentleman, both intellectually and materially, and he adopted the Socratic maxim, that a wise man keeps out of public business. He is described as being “of a different turn from his wife, fond of the severer studies, particularly mathematics.” Under his influence, the bounding Iambe from Horton gradually grew into the “Minerva,” as she was called by friends as well as epigrammatists. Mr. Montagu was a mathematician of great eminence; and a coal-owner of great wealth. He was a man of very retired habits and great amiability. He loved to puzzle fellow mathematicians with problems, and he did not dislike coals to be high in price; but he urged other owners to incur the odium of “making the advance.”

Mr. and Mrs. Montagu were married in London, and did not immediately leave it. Mr. Freind officiated at the marriage ceremony. The bride, in a note to Mrs. Freind, expressed her infinite obligation to him, “for not letting the knot be tied by the hands of an ordinary bungler.” On Friday, August 6th, the day after her marriage, the bride wrote to the Duchess of Portland: “If you will be at home to-morrow, at two o’clock, I will pass an hour with you; but pray send me word to Jermyn Street at eleven, whether I can come to you without meeting any person at Whitehall but the duke; to every one else pray deny your dressing-room. Mr. Freind will tell your Grace I really behaved magnanimously; not one cowardly tear, I assure you, did I shed at the solemn altar; my mind was in no mirthful mood indeed. I have a great hope of happiness. The world, as you say, speaks well of Mr. Montagu, and I have many obligations to him which must gain my particular esteem; but such a change of life must furnish one with a thousand anxious thoughts.”

Shortly after, the newly wedded pair travelled to one of Mr. Montagu’s estates in the north; but not alone. They were accompanied by the bride’s sister. The custom of sending a chaperon with a young married couple prevailed. Indeed, down to a comparatively recent period, some husbands and wives, who were married in Yorkshire, may remember that to have started on their wedding trip, or their journey home, without a third person, would have been considered lamentable indecorum.

The bride thus speaks of the journey and the new home. To Mrs. Freind, she writes:

“We arrived at this place (Allerthorpe, Yorkshire), after a journey of six days through fine countries. Mr. Montagu has the pleasure of calling many hundred pounds a year about his house his own, without any person’s property interfering with it. I think it is the prettiest estate and in the best order I ever saw: large and beautiful meadows for riding or walking in, and all as neat as a garden, with a pretty river (the Swale) winding about them, on which we shall sometimes go in boats. I propose to visit the almshouse very soon. I saw the old women, with the bucks upon their sleeves, at church, and the sight gave me pleasure. Heraldry does not always descend with such honour as when charity leads her by the hand.” A little later, Mrs. Montagu writes thus to the duchess:

“The sun gilds every object, but I assure you, it is the only fine thing we have had; for the house is old and not handsome: it is very convenient, and the situation extremely pleasant. We found the finest peaches, nectarines, and apricots that I have ever eat.” Then comes a dash of the old sauciness. She rejoices at the news the duchess had communicated to her, that Lord Dupplin, who once wrote verses on her taking a header into the Mary-le-bone plunging-baths, was the father of an heir to his title and estate. “I think no man better deserves a child. The end justifies the means; else, what should one say for his extreme, surprising, amazing fondness for the lady?... I am glad Lord Dupp enjoys his liberty and leisure. The repose a gentleman takes after the honour of sending a son into the world, may be called ease with dignity.”

Further evidences of the course of her married life are thus afforded by herself. On the 24th of August, Mrs. Montagu tells the duchess:

“It must be irksome to submit to a fool. The service of a man of sense is perfect freedom. Where the will is reasonable, obedience is a pleasure; but to run of a fool’s errand all one’s life is terrible.” And three days later, she writes to Mrs. Freind: “I think we increase in esteem, without decaying in complaisance; and I hope we shall always remember Mr. Freind and the 5th with thankfulness.”

Early in October, Mr. Montagu left his wife, parliamentary business calling him to town. She dreaded the invasion of condoling neighbours, and not without reason. “We have not been troubled with any visitors since Mr. Montagu went away; and could you see how ignorant, how awkward, how absurd, and how uncouth the generality of people are in this country, you would look upon this as no small piece of good fortune. For the most part, they are drunken and vicious, and worse than hypocrites—profligates. I am very happy that drinking is not within our walls. We have not had one person disordered by liquor since we came down, though most of the poor ladies in the neighbourhood have had more hogs in their drawing-room than ever they had in their hog-sty.” One visitor was unwelcomely assiduous. She thus hits him off to the duchess, as a portrait of a country beau and wit: “Had you seen the pains this animal has been taking to imitate the cringe of a beau, you would have pitied him. He walks like a tortoise and chatters like a magpie.... He was first a clown, then he was sent to the Inns of Court, where first he fell into a red waistcoat and velvet breeches, then into vanity. His light companions led him to the playhouse, where he ostentatiously coquetted with the orange wenches, who cured him of the bad air of taking snuff.... He then fell into the company of the jovial, till want of money and want of taste led this prodigal son, if not to eat, to drink with swine.... At last ... he returned to the country, where ... people treat him civilly ... and one gentleman in the neighbourhood is so fond of him as, I believe, to spend a great deal of money and most of his time upon him.”

There are parts in the letter, from which the above is an extract, which show a knowledge of London life, and of the consequences of leading it, which is marvellous. In more lively strain, this Lady of the Last Century moralised on marriage, under all its aspects, to the duchess; and she joked upon and handled the same subject, in her letters to Mrs. Donellan, with an astounding audacity, which was, however, not unnatural, in the days when mothers read Aphra Behn aloud, and sons and daughters listened to that arch-hussy’s highly flavoured comedies. Mrs. Montagu alludes to similar reading when drawing an “interior” for the duchess’s good pleasure, while Mr. Montagu was away. “I cannot boast of the numbers that adorn our fireside. My sister and I are the principal figures; besides, there is a round table, a square skreen, some books, and a work-basket, with a smelling-bottle, when morality grows musty, or a maxim smells too strong, as sometimes they will in ancient books.” She loved such books, nevertheless, much better than she did the neighbours that would be friendly.

“I do hourly thank my stars,” she says, “that I am not married to a country squire or a beau; for in the country, all my pleasure is in my own fireside, and that only when it is not littered with queer creatures. One must receive visits and return them ... and if you are not more happy in it in Nottinghamshire than I am in Yorkshire, I pity you most feelingly.... Could you but see all the good folks that visit my poor tabernacle, oh, your Grace would pity and admire!”

There was neither “squire” nor “beau” in the quiet, refined gentleman she had married. The wife might well be sorry for the absence of such a companion. He had left her, as she expressed it, to her mortification, but with her approbation. She desired him to go, yet half-wished him to stay; but at last “got out honour’s boots, and helped him to draw them on.” “Since I married,” she writes to Mrs. Freind, “I have never heard him say an ill word to any one; nor have I received one matrimonial frown.” For a matrimonial life begun in August, clouds and showers in October would have been an early prodigy indeed. To the duchess, who asked more as to her characteristic doings than her feelings, Mrs. Montagu replied:

December 1742—“Your Grace asks me if I have left off footing and tumbling down-stairs. As to the first, my fidgetations are much spoiled; sometimes I have cut a thoughtless caper, which has gone to the heart of an old steward of Mr. Montagu’s, who is as honest as Trusty in the play of ‘Grief à la Mode.’ I am told that he has never heard a hop that he has not echoed with a groan.”

At another of Mr. Montagu’s houses, Sandleford, near Newbury, Berks, his wife found more genial neighbours than in the north. She especially disliked the rough Yorkshire folk, and she did not conceal the little sympathy she had with “agreeable company.” She felt it a misfortune that she found in few people the qualities that pleased her. Like him who thanked God that he had not a heart that had room for many, she was thankful that she could love only the chosen few; but she could bear with twenty disagreeable people at once, while a tête-à-tête with a single one she disliked made her sick. At Sandleford, she played the farmer’s wife’s part without laying aside that of the lady, or, indeed, of the student. She could rattle off the gayest description of a country fair, losing no one of its characteristic features, and next write a long and thoughtful dissertation over Gastrell, Bishop of Chester’s “Moral Proof of the Certainty of a Future State.” The spirit of this dissertation, contained in a long letter to her friend the duchess, is that of what would now be called a Free Inquirer. She will not bow her intellect to any authority of mortal man. She has hope, but lacks knowledge,—except that God is the loving father of all,—and beyond that she evidently thinks the bishop knows no more than she does.

The ladies around her, at Sandleford, were neither so well endowed intellectually as herself, nor seemingly cared to be. Grottos and shellwork showed the bias of their tastes. Mrs. Montagu speaks of visiting one in Berkshire, which was the work of nine sisters (Leah), who in disposition, as well as number, bore “some resemblance to the Muses.” Lord Fane’s grotto at Basildon was one of the mild wonders of the county. When she goes thence to London, depreciation of the latter shows a growing love for rural life. She describes life in London as being—all the morning at the senate, all the night at play. Party politics were her aversion. They were “pursued for the benefit of individuals, not for the good of the country.” The factious heads in London she described as being very full of powder and very empty of thought. Happy in her own home, she could mingle jesting with sympathy when referring to sorrows which other people had to bear. “I pity Miss Anstey,” she wrote, “for the loss of her agreeable cousin and incomparable lover. For my part, I would rather have a merry sinner for a lover than so serious a saint!” Her own husband, however, was not mirthful. He stuck to his mathematics, understood his business as a coal-owner, loved his wife, and found life a pleasant thing, particularly where his lines had fallen.

With the birth of a boy came new occupations, fresh delights, and hitherto unknown anxieties. The nursing mother, remembering her old gay time, declared that “for amusement there is no puppet-show like the pleasant humour of my own Punch at Sandleford.” She fancied a bright futurity for the boy; but her passing ecstasy was damped by the thought of the perils and temptations by which life is beset. “Pity,” she wrote, “that a man thinks it no more necessary to be as innocent as woman than to be as fair.”

In March, 1744, when Mrs. Montagu and her sister thought it a remarkable fear to travel from Sandleford, near Newbury, to Dover Street, London, in one day, with only two breakdowns, Mrs. Montagu left her boy in the Berkshire house. “It was no such easy matter,” she said, “to part with little Punch, with whom we played and pleased ourselves as long as we could afford time.” On her return to Sandleford, in July, the natural beauty of the place seemed centred in little Punch’s person. “He is now an admirable tumbler. I lay him down on a blanket on the ground every morning, before he is dressed, and at night when he is stripped, and there he rolls and tumbles about, to his great delight. If my goddaughter,” adds the Last Century Lady to Doctor Freind, referring to his daughter, “be not a prude, I should recommend the same practice to her.”

The mother’s dreams and duties were soon brought to a melancholy close. In September, 1744, the little heir had his first severe experience of life, and, perhaps happily, it was too much for him. He died of convulsions while cutting his teeth. A few joyous tumbles on the blanket, a few kisses, a few honeyed words, and much pain at last, made up all that he knew of life. Mrs. Montagu tempered her heavy grief with much active occupation and study. She meekly attributed the loss of her son to God’s visitation on her confidence in her own care and watchfulness. She may be said to have lost with him her hopes, her joys, and her health for a considerable period. In September, 1744, she wrote to the duchess:

“Poor Mr. Montagu shows me an example of patience and fortitude, and endeavours to comfort me, though undoubtedly he feels as much sorrow as I can do; for he loved his child as much as ever parent could do.” She discovered all the virtues in Mr. Montagu that adversity needs, and adversity only can show. “I never saw such resignation and fortitude in any one; and in the midst of affliction there is comfort in having such a friend and assistant. It was once my greatest happiness to see him in possession of the dearest of blessings. It is now my greatest comfort to see he knows how to resign it, and yet preserve the virtue and dignity of his temper.” They never had another child; and, if they were not altogether as happy as before, they were, at least, as cheerfully resigned as heirless rich people could persuade themselves to be. Occasionally, however, she envied happier mothers. Referring to one of these, nearly twenty years later, who was then stricken by a profounder grief, Mrs. Montagu wrote to Lord Lyttelon: “Poor Mrs. Stone, between illness and affliction, is a melancholy object. I remember that after my son was dead, I used to envy her her fine boy; but not being of a wicked disposition, did earnestly wish she might not lose him. Poor woman! her felicity lasted longer than mine, and so her grief must be greater: but time is a sure comforter.”

Mrs. Montagu found relief for her sorrows, as well as for indisposition, from which she suffered greatly at intervals, at Tunbridge Wells and in small country gaieties. Thus, in 1745, at a country fair (ladies went to such sports in those days), Mrs. Montagu was not more surprised to see a gingerbread Admiral Vernon lying undisturbed on a basket of Spanish nuts, than she was at Tunbridge Wells to behold grave Doctor Young and old Colley Cibber on the most intimate terms. Mrs. Montagu, on the Pantiles, asked the doctor how long he intended to stay, and his answer was, “As long as your rival stays.” When this riddle was explained, the “rival” proved to be the sun. People from all ends of the world then congregated at the Wells, and Mrs. Montagu sketched them smartly, and grouped them cleverly, in pen and ink. One of the best of these outline sketches is that of a country parson, the vicar of Tunbridge, to whom she paid a visit in company with Doctor Young and Mrs. Rolt. “The good parson offered to show us the inside of his church, but made some apology for his undress, which was a true canonical dishabille. He had on a gray striped calamanco nightgown; a wig that once was white, but, by the influence of an uncertain climate, turned to a pale orange; a brown hat encompassed by a black hatband; a band somewhat dirty, that decently retired under the shadow of his chin; a pair of gray stockings, well mended with blue worsted, strong symptoms of the conjugal care and affection of his wife, who had mended his hose with the very worsted she had bought for her own.” The lively lady and her companions declined to take refreshment at the parsonage, where, she made no doubt, they would have been “welcomed by madam, in her muslin pinners and sarsnet hood; who would have given us some mead and a piece of cake that she had made in the Whitsun holidays, to treat her cousins.” After dinner at the inn, the vicar joined them, “in hopes of smoking a pipe, but our doctor hinted to him, that it would not be proper to offer any incense but sweet praise to such goddesses as Mrs. Rolt and your humble servant. I saw a large horn tobacco-box, with Queen Anne’s head upon it, peeping out of his pocket.” Wherever Mrs. Montagu wended during this autumn of 1745, she filled her letters with these pen-and-ink sketches of what she saw. But that eventful year brought more serious duties. In 1745, when the Jacobites were about to invade England, Mr. Montagu went from London to York, to aid in raising and arming the people. The Yorkshire gentlemen acted with great spirit, and stood by their homesteads instead of flying to London. “Though it gives me uneasiness and anxiety,” wrote the young wife, “I cannot wish those I love to act otherwise than consistently with those principles of honour that have always directed their actions.” The rebellion spoiled the London gaieties. Drums and routs had no longer a fashionable meaning. “I have not heard of any assemblies since I came to town; and, indeed, I think people frighten each other so much when they meet, that there is little pleasure arising from society.... There is not a woman in England, except Lady Brown, that has a song or tune in her head, but, indeed, her ladyship is very unhappy at the suspension of operas.”

The death of Mrs. Montagu’s mother, in the following year, drew from her a tender and well-deserved tribute of affection in a touching and simple letter to Mrs. Freind. In 1747, her friend, Mr. Lyttelton, lost his first wife, and wrote a monody on her, for the public ear. The monody walks on very high stilts, and occasionally falls and struggles on the ground. Mrs. Montagu thought it had great merit, and that her friend would be inconsolable; but Lyttelton brought out, the same year, his “Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of St. Paul,” of which Mrs. Montagu was a diligent reader and a constant eulogist. In less than two years, the widower left unfinished a prettily begun epitaph to his Lucy, with whom he had enjoyed six years of conjugal felicity, and married a daughter of Sir Robert Rich. With her came a life of warfare, followed by a treaty by which each party agreed to live at peace with, and wide apart from, the other.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Montagu made friendly progresses to princely mansions in various parts of the country. She had hearty welcome at all, from lay and ecclesiastical nobles alike. This did not influence her critical eye. At Wilton, then and now one of the best examples of an English nobleman’s residence, she writes: “As to the statues and bustos, they certainly are very fine, but I think too many. Heroes should not have so many competitors, nor philosophers so much company; a respectable society may be increased into a mob. I should, if they were mine, sell half of their figures to purchase their works, which are, indeed, the images of wise men.”

A cloud now came, and long rested, between her and the sun of her happiness. The death, in 1748, of her brother “Tom,” a man of wit, taste, and judgment, after her own heart; “the man in England for a point of law,” as Chief Justice Lee remarked; a man who had accomplished much, and who might have reasonably looked to the highest position, which could be attained in his branch of the profession, as his own,—the death of such a man, good, bright, aspiring, and qualified for success, was a loss to his brilliant sister for which she never found compensation. “As for this good young man,” she wrote, “I hoped it would rather have been his business to have grieved for me. Mr. Montagu is most careful of us, and I cannot, amidst my sorrow, help thanking Heaven for such a friend.” A letter from her husband in London confirms this statement: “I long to leave this place, and to be with you now, rather than at a time when you have less occasion for a friend. Be sure that you are constantly in my thoughts, and that no accidents of sickness or any other matter can work any change in me, or make me be with less affection than I have been, my dearest life, your most obliged and affectionate E. M.”

Compelled, subsequently, to repair to Bath for her health, she despised no innocent amusement. “I want mechanic helps,” she said, “for my real happiness, God knows, is lessened; and, though I have many relations left, I reflect that even this circumstance makes me more liable to have the same affliction repeated.” Then, after a week or two of omnivorous reading and friendly intercourse, she writes to the duchess: “Mrs. Trevanion, Lord Berkley of Stratton’s sister, goes away from us to-morrow, which I am sorry for; she seems very agreeable and well-bred, and has a thousand other good qualities that do not abound at our morning coffee-house, where I meet her. Whist and the noble game of E. O. employ the evening; three glasses of water, a toasted roll, a Bath cake, and a cold walk, the mornings.... My physician says three months will be necessary for me to drink the waters.... I am forced to dine by myself, not yet being able to bear the smell of what common mortals call a dinner. As yet I live with the fairies.... But here is another Mrs. Montagu, who is like me, hath a long nose, pale face, thin cheeks, and also, I believe, diets with fairies, and she is much better than when she came, and many people give me the honour of her recovery.”

After returning to Sandleford, she began again to need, or to fancy she needed, the restoring waters of Tunbridge. To Mrs. Anstey she wrote:

“I may, perhaps, trouble you to seek me some house about Mount Elphinstone; for, to tell you the truth, I get as far from the busy haunts of the place as I can; for it agrees neither with my inclination nor health to be in the midst of what are called the diversions of the place. An evening assembly in July is rather too warm; and, tell it not in the regions of politeness, I had rather see a few glowworms on a green in a warm summer’s evening than belles adorned with brilliants or beaux bright with clinquant. I cannot be at Tunbridge before the beginning of July. I am engaged to the nightingale and cuckoo for this month.”

Although continued ill-health kept Mrs. Montagu much in retirement after she first went to Tunbridge, the Wells had their usual effect. She was the centre of a circle of admiring friends; and when established for months together at Tunbridge Wells, her coterie was a thing apart from those of the Jews, Christians, and Heathens of all classes who crowded the Pantiles or the assembly-rooms. Her letters sparkle with the figures that flit through them. Some contemporary ladies of the last century are thus sharply crayoned: “I think the Miss Allens sensible, and I believe them good; but I do not think the Graces assisted Lucina at their birth.... Lady Parker and her two daughters make a very remarkable figure, and will ruin the poor mad woman of Tunbridge by outdoing her in dress. Such hats, capuchins, and short sacks as were never seen! One of the ladies looks like a state bed running upon castors. She has robbed the valance and tester of a bed for a trimming. They have each of them a lover. Indeed, as to the dowager, she seems to have no greater joys than E. O. and a toad-eater can give her.” That word “toad-eater” was still in its novelty as a slang term. In 1742, Walpole calls Harry Vane, afterward Earl of Darlington, “Pulteney’s toad-eater.” In 1744, Sarah Fielding, in “David Simple,” speaks of it as “a new word.” To Mr. Montagu, his wife thus wrote:

“My Dearest:—I had, this morning, the pleasure of your letter, which was in every respect agreeable, and in none more so than your having fixed your time for going to Sandleford, as I shall the sooner hope to see my best and dearest friend here.... I shall wish I could procure wings to bring me to you on the terrace at Sandleford, where I have passed so many happy hours in the conversation of the best of companions and kindest of friends; and I hope you will there recollect one who followed your steps as constantly as your shadow. I am still following them, for there are few moments in which my thoughts are not employed in you, and ever in the best and tenderest manner.... The charms of Sandleford are strongly in my remembrance, but still I would have you find that they want your little friend.”

From the gaieties of Tunbridge Mrs. Montagu went to the residence of a sage, Mr. Gilbert West. She found less pleasure among the sculpture and paintings of Wilton than under Gilbert West’s modest roof at Wickham, in whose master she saw “that miracle of the moral world, a Christian poet;” and in Mrs. West, something more than a tenth Muse or a fourth Grace. To conversations with West are attributed the deeper convictions of the truth of revealed religion which Mrs. Montagu entertained henceforward. She did not cease to be cheerful because on one point she was more serious. In a cottage which she hired near West’s house, she playfully offered to her lady visitors wholesome brown bread, sincerity, and red cow’s milk. With tastes that could find gratification wherever she might be, Mrs. Montagu was one of the happiest of women. Most happy, not when she was queen, or one of the queens, of society, but when she was among her books. She was an indefatigable reader. She reflected as deeply as she read carefully. The literature of the world was known to her, in the original text, or in translations, of which she would read three or four of the same work; and, if she had a preference, she would give an excellent reason for it. Her criticisms on the works she read are always admirable, whether she treats of a Thucydides in a French dress, of Cowley’s imperfections as an amatory poet, of Melmoth’s “Pliny’s Letters,” or of writers like Richardson, whose “Clarissa Harlowe” is analysed in one of the printed letters with a skill and insight that might be envied by the best writers of the times that have succeeded to her own. Fictitious and real personages, she dissects both with the hand of an operator who loves the work in which he excels. She is equally great when treating of the heroes of antiquity, or of the notorious Mrs. Pilkington, whose fie! fie! ways seem to warrant her slapping her with her fan; but whose talent, pleasant audacity, and suffering, soften Mrs. Montagu’s heart and lead her to gently kiss both cheeks of the erring Lætitia.

At the close of 1750, her brother Robert went in search of fortune to China, where, however, he found a grave. In the following year, she writes to her husband, who was on private business in the north: “I have sat so constantly in Lady Sandwich’s chimney-corner, I can give you little account of the world.” She playfully says to her absent lord: “I am glad you are so far tired of your monastic life as to think of returning to the secular state of a husband and member of Parliament.” She adds: “You have too many virtues for the contracted life of a monk, and, I thank my stars, are bound in another vow, one more fit for you, as it is social, and not selfish.” From Lady Sandwich’s chimney-corner, and from much study, mixed with every-day duties, it is pleasant to see her surrounded by the Ladies Stanhope and Mrs. Trevor, who were adjusting her dress when she went as the “queen-mother” to the subscription masquerade. The dress was “white satin, with fine new point for tuckers, kerchief and ruffles; pearl necklace and earrings, and pearls and diamonds on the head, and my hair curled after the Vandyke picture.” Mr. Montagu was so pleased with her appearance that, said the lady, “he has made me lay by my dress, to be painted in when I see Mr. Hoare again.” Better than her own presentment is her picture of the too famous Miss Chudleigh at this masquerade: “Miss Chudleigh’s dress, or rather undress, was remarkable. She was Iphigenia for the sacrifice; but so naked, the high priest might easily inspect the entrails of the victim. The maids of honour (not of maids the strictest) were so offended, they would not speak to her.”

It was with happy facility Mrs. Montagu turned from the studies she loved and the duties which she came to consider as her privilege, to the gayest scenes of life. “Though,” say she, “the education of women is always too frivolous, I am glad mine had such a qualification of the serious as to fit me for the relish of the belles bagatelles.” No one better understood the uses of money. When her husband was in the north furthering his coal interests, she wrote to him: “Though the coldness of our climate may set coals in a favourable light, I shall be glad to see as many of them turned to the precious metal as possible.... I have a very good opinion of Mr. Montagu and his wife. I like the prospect of these golden showers, and so I congratulate you upon them; but, most of all, I congratulate you upon the disposition of mind which made you put the account of them in a postscript.” The last words of her own letters to her husband were invariably affectionate, with a sentiment of submission that has a very old-fashioned air about it. For example:

“Every tender wish and grateful thought wait on you, and may you ever as kindly accept the only gift in my power, the faithful love and sincere affection of your most grateful and obedient wife, E. M.” Again, in September, 1751, from Tunbridge Wells: “To your prayer that we may never be so long separated, I can, with much zealous fervour, say Amen!”

CHAPTER III.

In October, Mrs. Montagu was in her town house, in Hill Street, receiving company. Guests of the present day will read, perhaps with a smile of wonder, the following illustration of the times: “The Duke and Duchess of Portland and Lord Titchfield dined with me to-day, and stayed till eight o’clock.”

In the year 1752, there was a subpreceptor to the Prince of Wales, named George Lewis Scott. His baptismal names were those of the King George I., at whose court in Hanover Scott’s father had held some respectable office. The son was recommended for the preceptorship by Bolingbroke to Bathurst, who spoke in the candidate’s favour to the prince’s mother, and the king’s sanction followed. Walpole describes Scott as well-meaning, but inefficient, through undue interference, and as a man of no “orthodox odour, as might be expected of a protégé of Bolingbroke.” Mr. Scott had literary tastes, and occasionally exercised them with credit. Such a man seemed a fitting wooer for Sarah Robinson, Mrs. Montagu’s clever sister. The wooing sped, marriage followed, and separation, from incompatibility of temper, came swiftly on the heels of it. The correspondence throws no light on a dark episode; but in April, 1752, Mrs. Delany wrote to Mrs. Dewes, in reference to Mrs. Scott’s marriage and the separation of herself and husband, the following words: “What a foolish match Mrs. Scott has made for herself. Mrs. Montagu wrote Mrs. Donellan word that she and the rest of her friends had rescued her out of the hands of a very bad man; but, for reasons of interest, they should conceal his misbehaviour as much as possible, but entreated Mrs. Donellan would vindicate her sister’s character whenever she heard it attacked, for she was very innocent.” Perhaps it was the misery that came of this marriage that made Mrs. Montagu conclude a letter from Heys to her husband, during this year, with these words: “Adieu, my dearest, may you find amusement everywhere, but the most perfect happiness with her who is by every grateful and tender sentiment your most affectionate and faithful wife, E. M.” The writer herself could find amusement everywhere. A country-house, well-furnished with books, made Sandleford more agreeable to her than the glories within and the dust without her house in Hill Street. She speaks deliciously of having her writing-table beneath the shade of the Sandleford elms, and she thus pleasantly contrasts country-house employments with the pleasures of reading ancient history, which lightened the burthen of those employments: “To go from the toilet to the senate-house; from the head of a table to the head of an army; or, after making tea for a country justice, to attend the exploits, counsels, and harangues of a Roman consul, gives all the variety the busy find in the bustle of the world, and variety and change (except in a garden) make the happiness of our lives.” She read Hooke’s “Roman History” as an agreeable variety. Her mind was stronger than her body. She was now only thirty-two years of age; and she writes to Gilbert West, that ex-lieutenant of horse, and honest inquirer into theological questions: “You will imagine I am in extraordinary health, when I talk of walking two miles in a morning.” If she could not walk far, she could read and stand anything. In December, she was again at home in Hill Street. On Christmas Eve, 1752, she writes: “I proposed answering my dear Mrs. Boscawen’s letter yesterday, but the Chinese-room was filled by a succession of people from eleven in the morning till eleven at night.”

Early in January, 1753, close upon the anniversary of the death of the brother whom she dearly loved,—her brother “Tom,”—who died a bachelor, in 1748, an event occurred, the bearing of which is only partially told in a letter from Mrs. Montagu to Gilbert West: “My mind was so shocked at my arrival here, that for some days I was insupportably low. I am now better able to attend to the voice of reason and duty. A friendship, begun in infancy, and reunited by our common loss and misfortune, had many tender ties. By tender care I had raised her from despair almost to tranquillity. I had hourly the greatest of pleasures, that of obliging a most grateful person. She made every employment undertaken for me, and every expression of my satisfaction in her execution of those employments, a pleasure. I received from her kind offices, which, however considerable, fell short of the zeal that prompted them. Of this, I do not know that there is a pattern left in the world. She was much endeared, and her loss embittered to me by another consideration, which you may reasonably blame, as it shows too fond an attachment to those things which we ought to resign to the Great Giver; but while she was under my care, I thought a kind of intercourse subsisted between me and a most dear and valuable friend whom I lost this time five years. Whatever I did for her I thought done for that friend on whom my affections, hopes, and pride were placed.”

This little romance having come to a sad conclusion, Mrs. Montagu was soon afterward in town, running, as she said, “from house to house, getting the cold scraps of visiting conversation, served up with the indelicacy and indifference of an ordinary, at which no power of the mind does the honours; the particular taste of each guest is not consulted, the solid part of the entertainment is too gross for a delicate taste, and the lighter fare insipid. Indeed, I do not love fine ladies, but I am to dine with ... to-morrow, notwithstanding.” Again, in November, 1754, she writes from Hill Street, the day after her arrival: “In my town character, I made fifteen visits last night. I should not so suddenly have assumed my great hoop, if I had not desired to pay the earliest respects to Lady Hester Pitt, who is something far beyond a merely fine lady.”

Mrs. Montagu did not seek for friends exclusively among the great. With her and with Lyttelton, intellect was the chief attraction. They both received into their friendship the refugee Bower, who made so much noise in his day. Mrs. Montagu and Lyttelton refused to abandon him when he was assailed by his enemies. When she was told, in a letter from a Roman Catholic, that Bower, the ex-Jesuit whom she had received in her house, was a knave, that his wife was a hussy, and that Mrs. Montagu herself was an obstinate idoliser and a perverse baby for believing in them, she continued her trust, despised report, and asked for facts.

In 1755, Mrs. Montagu affected to detect the first sign of her superannuation in her sudden resolution not to go to Lady Townshend’s ball, though a new pink silver negligée lay ready for the donning. Once, she said, her dear friend, Vanity, could lure her over the Alps or the ocean to a ball like Lady Townshend’s. The day was past since she would have gone eight miles, in winter, to dance to a fiddle, and would have squalled with joy at being upset on her way home. She and Vanity, she thought, had now parted. “I really believe she has left me as lovers do their mistresses, because I was too fond, denied her nothing, and was too compliant to give a piquancy to our commerce.” She was as “sharp” in judging others as herself. Of Lady Essex (the daughter of Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, who married the Earl of Essex in 1754, and died in 1759), Mrs. Montagu, in the intervening year, 1756, says: “Lady Essex coquettes extremely with her own husband, which is very lawful.... She wants to have the bon ton, and we know the bon ton of 1756 is un peu equivoque.”

And now, in the year 1757, the celebrated word “bluestockings” first occurs in Mrs. Montagu’s correspondence. Boswell, under the date 1781, tells us in his “Life of Johnson,” that “about this time, it was much the fashion for several ladies to have evening assemblies, where the fair sex might participate in conversation with literary and ingenious men, animated by a desire to please. These societies were denominated Blue Stocking Clubs. One of the most eminent members of these societies, when they first commenced, was Mr. Benjamin Stillingfleet, whose dress was remarkably grave, and, in particular, it was observed that he wore blue stockings. Such was the excellence of his conversation, that his absence was felt as so great a loss that it used to be said, ‘We can do nothing without the blue stockings,’ and thus, by degrees, the title was established.” Boswell was greatly mistaken, for, in 1781, Benjamin Stillingfleet, the highly accomplished gentleman, philosopher, and barrack-master of Kensington, had been dead ten years, and he had left off wearing blue stockings at least fourteen years before he died. This subject will be referred to in a subsequent page. Meanwhile, in March, 1757, when rumours of war were afloat, Mrs. Montagu gaily wrote to her husband; “If we were in as great danger of being conquered by the Spaniards as by the French, I should not be very anxious about my continuance in the world; but the French are polite to the ladies, and they admire ladies a little in years, so that I expect to be treated with great politeness, and as all laws are suspended during violence, I suppose that you and the rest of the married men will not take anything amiss that happens on the occasion: nor, indeed, should it be a much greater fault than keeping a monkey if one should live with a French marquis for a quarter of a year!” A little later, Walpole told George Montagu a story which illustrates the scandal-power of the period. “I was diverted,” he wrote, “with the story of a lady of your name and a lord whose initial is no further from hers than he himself is supposed to be. Her postilion, a lad of fifteen, said, ‘I’m not such a child but I can guess something! Whenever my Lord Lyttelton comes to my lady, she orders the porter to let in nobody else, and then they call for pen and ink, and say they are going to write history!’ I am persuaded, now that he is parted, that he will forget he is married, and propose himself in form to some woman or other!”

Such scandal as this could not affect either of the parties against whom it was pointed. In the next following years of the reign of George the Second, Mrs. Montagu led her usual life. In London, gay; in the country, busy and thoughtful. “In London,” she asks, “who can think? Perhaps, indeed, they may who are lulled by soft zephyrs through the broken pane, but it cannot happen to ladies in Chinese-rooms!” In those rooms she received all, native and foreign, whose brains or other desirable possessions entitled them to a welcome. At Sandleford, she was sometimes reading a translation of Sophocles, dear to her almost as Shakespeare himself, but as often she was amid accounts relative to firkins of butter, tubs of soap, and chaldrons of coal. When she left the country, it was in the odour of civility; for Mr. and Mrs. Montagu invited a cargo of good folks to dinner, and, like Sir Peter Teazle, left their characters among them to be discussed till the next season. In 1758, Mrs. Montagu became acquainted with Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, the translator of Epictetus; and Mr. Montagu, by the death of a relative, succeeded to the inheritance of rich possessions in the north. Mrs. Montagu thought she had got the richer estate, in the learned lady who had become her friend. Nevertheless, she bore the accession of fortune with hilarious philosophy. “As the gentleman from whom Mr. Montagu inherits had been mad about forty years, and almost bedridden for the last ten, I had always designed to be rather pleased and happy when he resigned his unhappy being and his good estate.” She only fancied there was neither pleasure nor happiness in it, because the “business” appertaining to succession was wearisome.

When she found herself among the great coal-owners, she was neither happy nor pleased. They could only talk of coal, and of those who had been made or ruined by it. “As my mind is not naturally set to this tune,” she wrote to Mr. Benjamin Stillingfleet, “I should often be glad to change it for a song from one of your Welsh bards.” She, however, intended to turn the occasion to intellectual profit by exploring the country, and studying its beauties and natural productions, but a little fainting fit put an end to this design. An overzealous maid went to her aid, when fainting, with a bottle of eau-de-luce, but as she emptied the contents into Mrs. Montagu’s throat, instead of applying it outwardly for refreshment, the lady was nigh upon being then and there deprived of upwards of forty years of life. She happily recovered, and by and by she speaks of herself, in London, as “going wherever two or three fools were gathered together, to assemblies, visiting-days etc. Twenty-four idle hours, without a leisure one among them!” So she said; but an order to Mrs. Denoyer, at the Golden Bible, Lisle Street, for a hundred of the best pens and half a ream of the finest and thinnest quarto paper, indicates how many hours of the twenty-four were employed. She thought, or she affected to think, that she grew idler as she grew older. In one of her letters to old Doctor Monsey,—a grotesque savage and scholar, who, in lugubrious jokery, wrote love-letters (which she pretended to take seriously) at fourscore,—she said, in September, 1757, just before her thirty-seventh birthday: “I shall write to you again when I am thirty-seven; but I am now engaged in a sort of death-bed repentance for the idleness of the thirty-sixth year of my age!” She certainly took a wrong view of her case when she further said: “Having spent the first part of my life in female vanities, the rest in domestic employments, I seem as if I had been measuring ribbons in a milliner’s, or counting pennyworths of figs and weighing sugar-candy in a grocer’s shop all my life.” This was no affectation. “If you envy me,” she added, “or know any one who does, pray tell them this sad truth. Nothing can be more sad. Nothing can be more true.”

It would have been sad, if it had been true; but she was severe in her own censure. If she cheerfully plunged into the vortex of fashionable duties, she persistently proclaimed her higher enjoyment of home privileges. She sneered at her own presence wherever two or three fools were gathered together, but her honest ambition was to establish friendships with the wise and the virtuous. Johnson assured her of her “goodness so conspicuous,” and was proud of being asked to use his influence to obtain her support of poor Mrs. Ogle’s benefit concert, as it gratified his vanity that he should be “supposed to be of any importance to Mrs. Montagu.” With respect, at this time, for Johnson, she had a deeper feeling of regard for Burke. “Mr. Burke, a friend of mine.” There is reasonable pride in the assertion, and how tenderly and cleverly she paints her “friend!”—“He is, in conversation and writing, an ingenious and ingenuous man, modest and delicate, and on great and serious subjects full of that respect and veneration which a good mind, and a great one, is sure to feel; he is as good and worthy as he is ingenious.” Her love of books was like her love of friends. Dressed for a ball, she sat down, read through the “Ajax” and the “Philoctetes” of Sophocles, wrote a long critical letter on the two dramas, and, losing her ball, earned her bed and the deep sleep she enjoyed in it. At Tunbridge, she describes the occupation of a single morning as consisting of going to chapel, then to a philosophical lecture, next to hear a gentleman play the viol d’amore, and finally to hold controversy with a Jew and a Quaker. In 1760, she was equally vivacious, in “sad Newcastle.” In September of that year, she writes to Lord Lyttelton, that she was taking up her freedom, by entering into all the diversions of the place. “I was at a musical entertainment yesterday morning, at a concert last night, at a musical entertainment this morning; I have bespoken a play for to-morrow night, and shall go to a ball, on choosing a mayor, on Monday night.” But in the hours of leisure, between these dissipations, she fulfilled all her duties as a woman of business in connection with her steward’s accounts and the coal interests, and devoted the remainder to the study of works in the loftiest walks of literature. “More leisure and fewer hours,” she says, “had possibly made me happier, but my business is to make the best of things as they are.” She ever made the best of two old and wise men who professed, in mirth, to make love to her in all seriousness. The two wise men look, in their correspondence, like two fools. Lord Bath, the wiser of the two, looks more of a fool than Doctor Monsey, and there is something nauseous in the affected playfulness of the aged lovers, and also in the equally affected virginal coyness with which Mrs. Montagu received, encouraged, or put aside their rather audacious gallantry. Her part in these pseudo love-passages was born of her charity. It gave the two old friends pleasure (Lord Lyttelton himself styled her Ma Donna), and it did no harm to the good-natured lady. Lord Bath, however, is not to be compared with such a buffoon as Monsey. His honest opinion of Mrs. Montagu was, that there never was and never would be a more perfect being created than that lady. And Burke said that the praise was not too highly piled.

It was at this period that Mrs. Montagu first appeared as an authoress, but anonymously. Of the “Dialogues of the Dead,” published under Lord Lyttelton’s name, she supplied three. They are creditable to her, and are not inferior to those by my lord, which have been sharply criticised, under the name of “Dead Dialogues,” by Walpole. In “Cadmus and Mercury,” the lady shows that strength of mind, properly applied, is better than strength of body. There is great display of learning; Hercules, however, talks like gentle Gilbert West; and Cadmus, when he says that “actions should be valued by their utility rather than their éclat,” shows a knowledge of French which was hardly to be expected in him.

If we are surprised at the cleverness of Cadmus, in speaking French, we cannot but wonder at the ignorance of Mercury, in the next dialogue, with a modern fine lady, in not knowing the meaning of bon ton. But the lady’s description of it is as good as anything in the comedy of the day. As for the manners of the period, as far as they regard husbands, wives, and children, their shortcomings are described with a hand that is highly effective, if not quite masterly.

Mrs. Montagu seems to think that Ici on parle Français might be posted upon the banks of the Styx; for, in the dialogue between Plutarch, Charon, and a modern bookseller, the first alludes to finesse, and the second refers to the friseur of Tisiphone. But Plutarch had met M. Scuderi in the Shades! On the other hand, he had never heard of Richardson or Fielding! Nevertheless, the criticisms on modern fiction and modern vices are, if not ringing with wit, full of good sense and fine satire. They could only have come from one who had not merely read much, but who had thought more: one who had not only studied the life and society of which she was a part, but who could put a finger on the disease and also point out the remedy.

The first and last dialogues are enriched by remarks which are the result of very extensive reading. That between Mercury and the modern fine lady abounds in proofs of the writer’s observation, and consequently of illustrations of contemporary social life. The lady pleads her many engagements, in bar to the summons of Mercury to cross the Styx. These are not engagements to husband and children, but to the play on Mondays, balls on Tuesdays, the opera on Saturdays, and to card assemblies the rest of the week, for two months to come. She had indeed found pleasure weary her when the novelty had worn off; but “my friends,” she says, “always told me diversions were necessary, and my doctor assured me dissipation was good for my spirits. My husband insisted that it was not; and you know that one loves to oblige one’s friends, comply with one’s doctor, and contradict one’s husband.” She will, however, willingly accompany Mercury, if he will only wait for her till the end of the season. “Perhaps the Elysian fields may be less detestable than the country in our world. Pray have you a fine Vauxhall and Ranelagh? I think I should not dislike drinking the Lethe waters when you have a full season.” This fine lady has not been destitute of good works. “As to the education of my daughters, I spared no expense. They had a dancing-master, a music-master, and a drawing-master, and a French governess to teach them behaviour and the French language.” No wonder that Mercury sneered at the fact that the religion, sentiment, and manners of those young ladies were to be learnt “from a dancing-master, music-master, and a chambermaid.” As to the last, there soon came in less likely teachers of French to young ladies than French chambermaids. General Burgoyne makes his Miss Allscrip (in “The Heiress,” a comedy first played in 1786) remark: “We have young ladies, you know, Blandish, boarded and educated, upon blue boards in gold letters, in every village; with a strolling player for a dancing-master, and a deserter from Dunkirk to teach the French grammar.”

The dialogues had a great success. The three avowedly “by another hand” interested the public, as the circumstance gave them a riddle to be solved in their leisure hours. They were attributed to men of such fine intellect that Mrs. Montagu had every reason to be delighted at such an indirect compliment.

If her own account is to be taken literally, she had now, at forty, assumed gravity as a grace and an adornment. In 1761, she wrote to Mrs. Elizabeth Carter that, whether in London or in the country, “I am become one of the most reasonable, quiet, good kind of country gentlewoman that ever was.” And she closes another letter to the same lady, in September of the same year, with the observation,—made when she was only forty-one, and had but just accomplished half of a career of which she was already tired,—“I will own I often feel myself so weary of my journey through this world, as to wish for more rest, a quiet Sabbath after my working days; but when such time shall come, perhaps some painful infirmity may find my virtue employment; but all this I leave to Him who knows what is best.”

While the writer was recording this wish and making this reflection, all England was in a frenzy of exultation at the accession of the young king, George III., and all London in feverish excitement at the coming of a young queen. When, so to speak, the uproar of festival and congratulation culminated at the coronation of the young royal couple, the lady who was weary of life and sighed for a Sabboth of rest, got into a coach at Fulham at half-past four on an October morning, and was driven to Lambeth. With her gay company she was rowed across the river from Lambeth to the cofferer’s office, whence she saw the procession go and return, between Westminster Hall and the Abbey, and owned that it exceeded her expectations. The return to the Hall was made, however, in the dark; and, under shadow of night, the Montagu party were rowed to York Buildings, where a carriage waited to take them to Fulham. The lady, stirred by a new sensation, which was followed by neither fatigue nor indisposition, seemed to have resumed the spirit of the nymph who used to take headers into the Mary-le-bone Gardens plunging-bath, and to be complimented, on her daring, in ballads, by Lord Dupplin!

When the fashionable world flocked to Mrs. Montagu’s house in Hill Street, in the middle of last century, the street was not paved, and the road was very much at the mercy of the weather. To get to the house was not always an easy matter. When entered, the visitor found it furnished in a style of which much was said, and at which the hostess herself laughed. “Sick of Grecian elegance and symmetry, or Gothick grandeur and magnificence, we must all seek the barbarious gaudy goût of the Chinese; and fat-headed pagods and shaking mandarins bear the prize from the finest works of antiquity; and Apollo and Venus must give way to a fat idol with a sconce on his head. You will wonder I should condemn the taste I have complied with, but in trifles I shall always conform to the fashion.”

There were duties connected with her position which Mrs. Montagu as scrupulously fulfilled. Receiving and returning visits was “a great devoir.” Resort to assemblies was a “necessary thing;” the duty of seeing and being seen was an indispensable duty; but she had mental resources which enabled her to pity the “polite world,” which had no way of driving away ennui but by pleasure. If in Hill Street she was of “the quality,” as Chesterfield called them, in the country she was not only what she loved to call herself, a farmer’s wife, but a political economist. At Sandleford we see a poor wretch standing at the door of the mansion. She is hideous from dirt, poverty, and contagious disease born of both. The lady farmer was not only charitable but something besides. “I was very angry with her,” she says, “that she has lately introduced another heir to wretchedness and want. She has not half Hamlet’s delicacies on the question. To be or not to be! The law’s delays are very puny evils to those her offspring must endure. The world affords no law to make her rich, and yet she will increase and multiply over the face of the earth.”

Throughout the printed letters, continual examples occur of Mrs. Montagu’s acute observation of character, and of her happy expression when she described it. She not only watched closely, but spoke boldly of the ladies around her, and of their more or less pretty ways. Thus, Mrs. Montagu saw that all the ladies courted Doctor Young, the poet, but she was sure it was only because they had heard he was a genius, and not that they knew he was one. When some misses expressed their delight at a particular ball, she remarked that their delight was probably increased by the absence of Miss Bladen, who became Lord Essex’s second countess, and who was not there to outshine them! “So strong in women,” she said, “was the desire of pleasing, each would have that happy power confined to her own person.” It did not escape her eye that Lady Abercorn and Lady Townshend, “each determining to have the most wit of any person in the company, always chose different parties and different ends of the room.” How gracefully serene is the portrait of the Duchess of Somerset, who did what was civil without intending to be gracious, and who so surprised Mrs. Montagu, in 1749, because the princely state and pride the duchess had so long been used to, had “left her such an easiness of manners.” One of her exceptional touches was when she described the pious Countess of Huntingdon as a “well-meaning fanatic.” That must have been after Gilbert West and Lord Lyttelton had brought her out of the field of Free Inquirers, and the Primate of Ireland had made her of the religion of the Established Church. At that period she would have placed the church above the law, resembling the old Scottish woman of the kirk, who, on pronouncing that to take a walk on the Sabbath was a deadly sin, was reminded that Jesus himself had walked in the corn-fields on the Sabbath-day, to which she replied, “Ah weel, it is as ye say; but I think none the better o’ him for it!”

Adverting to a wicked saying, that few women have the virtues of an honest man, Mrs. Montagu maintained that a little of the blame thereof falls on the men, “who are more easily deluded than persuaded into compliance. This makes the women have recourse to artifice to gain power, which, as they have gained by the weakness or caprice of those they govern, they are afraid to lose by the same kind of arts addressed to the same kind of qualities; and the flattery bestowed by the men on all the fair from fifteen, makes them so greedy of praise that they most excessively hate, detest, and revile every quality in another woman which they think can obtain it.” This is the censure, or judgment, be it remembered, on Last Century Ladies!

When Mrs. Fielding, to benefit those ladies, wrote a novel called “The Penitents,” supposed to be the history of the unhappy fair ones in the Magdalen House, Mrs. Montagu remarked, hesitatingly, “As all the girls in England are reading novels, it may be useful to put them on their guard;” but she adds, decisively, “If I had a daughter, I should rather trust her to ignorance and innocence than to the effect of these cautions!”

Of course, Mrs. Montagu studied the gentlemen as profoundly as the ladies. As one result, she gently laughed at Doctor Young’s philosophy, which brought him to believe that one vice corrects another, till an animal made up of ten thousand bad qualities grows to be a social creature tolerable to live with. Sir William Brown could hardly claim this toleration, for he had not discovered (said Mrs. Montagu) that the wisest man in the company is not always the most welcome, and that people are not at all times disposed to be informed. Fancy may easily bring before the reader the sort of conversation which Mrs. Montagu was able to hold with Mr. Plunket. She says of it: “Some people reduce their wit to an impalpable powder, and mix it up in a rebus; others wrap up theirs in a riddle: but mine and Mr. Plunket’s certainly went off by insensible perspiration in small talk.” She was so satisfied that there was a right place for a wise man to play the fool in, that she expressed a hope to Gilbert West (who was turning much of her thought from this world to the next) and to his wife, that “you will, both of you, leave so much of your wisdom at Wickham as would be inconvenient in town.” West feared that, at Sandleford, she sent invitations to beaux and belles to fill the vacant apartments of her mind. She merrily answered, that there was empty space enough there for French hoops and echoes of French sentiments; but she also seriously replied, “There are few of the fine world whom I should invite into my mind, and fewer still who are familiar enough there to come unasked.”

Mrs. Montagu hated no man, but she thoroughly despised Warburton. The way he mauled Shakespeare by explaining him, excited her scornful laughter; the way in which he marred Christianity by defending it, excited much more than angry contempt. “The levity shocks me, the indecency displeases me, the grossièreté disgusts me. I love to see the doctrine of Christianity defended by the spirit of Christianity.” Bishop Warburton and some country parsons were equally silly in her mind. Of a poor riddle, she says, “A country parson could not puzzle his parish with it, even if he should endeavour to explain it in his next Sunday’s sermon. Though I have known some of them explain a thing till all men doubted it.”

From the rule by which she measured all men, she did not except any one of her brothers: and never did sister love her brothers more tenderly and reasonably. Her brother William, the clergyman, was restless in temper from excess of love of ease. “My brother Robinson,” she wrote to her sister, Mrs. Scott, in 1755, “is emulating the great Diogenes ... he flies the delights of London, and leads a life of such privacy and seriousness, as looks to the beholders like wisdom, but, for my part, no life of inaction deserves that name.” Other characters she strikes off in a single sentence. That referring to Sir Charles Williams is a very good sample from an overflowing measure. “Sir Charles,” she said, “is still so flighty, that had he not always been a wit, he would still pass for a madman!” When she refers to Lord Hyde’s printed, but never acted comedy, “The Mistakes, or the Happy Resentment,” and says, “I suppose you will read the play, as it is by so great a man,” she was probably thinking of Miss Tibbs, who, “it is well known, always showed her good breeding by devoting all her attention to the people of highest rank in the company.”

Mrs. Montagu was as clever at generalities as when sketching individuals and special peculiarities. The numerous Jews at Tunbridge Wells, in 1745, she describes as having “worse countenances than their friend Pontius Pilate in a bad tapestry-hanging.” Good farmer’s wife as she said of herself, and also very fond of refined luxury, she laughed in her letters at those persons who built palaces in gardens of beauty, and left, as she said, nothing rude and waste but their minds; nothing harsh and unpolished but their tempers. To her, no knowledge came amiss. Amid all the gaieties of the life at Bath, she took interest in the chemistry of every-day life. During one of her visits, she was initiated into the mysteries of making malt!

Her very affectations, as they were called, sprung from her endowments. Her learning and reading, and intercourse with scholars and thinkers, furnished her with extraordinary figures and illustrations that were applied to very ordinary uses.

Neither Elizabeth Robinson nor Mrs. Montagu would be so commonplace as to say the moon shone, but “the silver Cynthia held up her lamp in the heavens.” She could readily detect and denounce this learned affectation, this sacrifice of the natural to the classical in others; and she said with truth of Hammond’s “Elegies,” “They please me much, but between you and me, they seem to me to have something of a foreign air. Had the poet read Scotch ballads oftener, and Ovid and Tibullus less, he had appeared a more natural writer and a more tender lover.” These terse sayings are well worth collecting. Here is one from a heap that will furnish a thousand “I own the conversation of a simpleton is a grievance, but there the disparity of a wise man and a fool often ends.”

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Photogravure after an original miniature

Here may be closed the illustrations of Mrs. Montagu’s life, drawn chiefly from her published letters. The following sketches of her own life, and of that by which she was surrounded, are taken from letters, with one or two exceptions, now for the first time printed.

CHAPTER IV.

The unpublished letters take up the glorious theme previous to the last incident named in the published correspondence. The earliest is from Mrs. Montagu’s sister, Mrs. Scott, to the wife of their brother, the Rev. W. Robinson, at Naples. The two sisters, Elizabeth and Sarah, loved each other with intense affection. The younger went long by the nickname of Pea, from her extraordinary likeness to her elder sister, who used, before Sarah’s unhappy marriage, to rally her on the obesity of her lovers and her cruelty in reducing them to consumptiveness and asses’ milk.

March 28, 1761. Mrs. Scott to Mrs. Robinson, Naples.—“The Tories are in high spirits. The king has declared that, as they are possessed of the greatest part of the property of the kingdom, they ought to have a great share in the government, and accordingly many are taken into place. The king was asked what orders he would have given to the dockmen against the approaching election. His Majesty answered, ‘No orders at all.’ He would have them left to themselves. Lord Granville said, ‘That was leaving them to be directed by the First Lord of the Admiralty’ (Lord Anson). The king replied, ‘That was true; he had not considered that; they must, therefore, be told to vote for the Tories, to be sure.’ The late Speaker and the Parliament took a most tender farewell of each other. They thanked and he thanked, and then they re-thanked, and in short, never were people so thankful on both sides; and then they recommended him to the king, to do more than thank him; but he refused any reward. Only, his son, it is said, will have a pension of £2,000 per annum—a good, agreeable compliment, and yet what no one will disapprove.”

Walpole describes Onslow’s retirement, after holding the office of Speaker during thirty years, in five successive Parliaments, in these words: “The Speaker has taken leave and received the highest compliments, and substantial ones, too. He did not overact, and it was really a handsome scene. Onslow accepted a pension of £3,000 a year for his own life and that of his son—afterward Lord Onslow.”

After noticing the changes in the ministry, and conferring of honours on, and the granting of pensions to persons of no great public importance, Mrs. Scott turns to the death of the great master of the ceremonies at Bath, Beau Nash, and to the conduct of the great statesman, Mr. Pitt. “Mr. Nash, I believe, died since I wrote to you, and all his effects are to be sold for the benefit of his creditors, but will not prove sufficient to pay his debts. Collett now officiates as his successor, though others are talked of for that noble post; but as neither the corporation nor the keeper of the rooms seem disposed to annex any salary to it, I imagine Collett will continue in possession; for I think no one else will do it without other reward than the honour and profit arising therefrom.”

Collett, after brief possession of the post so long held by Nash, was succeeded by Derrick, an adventurer in whom Bath was as much interested as England was in Pitt, of whom Mrs. Scott thus writes: “Mr. Pitt still continues in his post. Without connections of any sort, without the power of conferring honours or places, he commands imperiously, and forces obedience from mere superiority of parts and integrity. As a statesman he is self-existent, and depends on none, nor has any dependent on him. He does not see his oldest friends but when they have business to impart, obliges none by private benefits, nor engages any by social intercourse. His mind seems too great for any object less than a whole nation. There is something very new and extremely surprising in his conduct. He is an Almanzor in politicks. He is himself alone. How long he can stand thus, only time can show. As there was scarcely ever an instance of the like, we have no precedents by which to form conjectures. National prejudices about Scotchmen are lulled asleep. Lord Bute is high in favour; the city is pleased with him; the Tories much attached to him. The king is still generally applauded. Our sex went in such numbers to the House of Lords at the closing of the session, to see his Majesty on the throne, that good part of the company fainted away, and not above three lords had room to sit down....

“My brother Matt is at present prosecuting the minister of Lyminge for non-residence, in revenge for some offence he has given him about the tithes; and my father bids fair for being engaged in prosecuting a clergyman at Canterbury, for saying he was in the Rebellion in the year ’16.... Report says that the Duchess of Richmond and some other ladies, whose husbands are going or gone to Germany, are going there likewise, and are to be at Brunswick. I much question whether their husbands will rejoice in their company, but certainly Prince Ferdinand will not be fond of such auxiliaries. It is the oddest party of pleasure I ever heard of. Thomas Diaforus, who invites his mistress to the lively amusement of making one at a dissection, would be an agreeable lover to these ladies.... Perhaps they think Germany may afford them more of their husbands’ company than they can obtain in England; for some among them would think that a valuable acquisition, and possibly they may not be mistaken, for a drum that leads to battle may not be so powerful a rival to a wife as one that leads its followers only to coquetry.”

Mrs. Scott’s reference to Pitt, secretary of state and soul of the ministry, of which the old imbecile Duke of Newcastle was the nominal head, seems to have been made with Almanzor’s lines in her memory.

“Know, that I alone am king of me!

I am as free as Nature first made man,

Ere the base laws of servitude began,

When wild in woods the noble savage ran.

I saw th’ oppress’d, and thought it did belong

To a king’s office to redress the wrong,” etc.

The public mind, however, was not so much occupied with men of mark as with a ceremony which had not been witnessed in England for very many years. In a letter from Batheaston, September 14, 1761, written by Mrs. Scott to her sister-in-law, at Naples, she describes the time as one of general madness, and continues as follows:

“One would imagine that no king had ever married or any state ever had a queen before. The nation has for some time been and will still longer be absolutely frantic. The expected princess was to be all perfection, both in person and mind, and I believe few ever took so much pleasure in the possession of their own wives as they have in his Majesty’s having obtained so rare a blessing. I don’t think so great a compliment has been paid to matrimony for many years past. Miss Arnold, who is gone up to my brother Morris, in order to be ready for the coronation, has had a sight of her Majesty; and from her, as well as others, I understand she is very far from handsome. Her mouth fills a great part of her face. When Miss Arnold saw her, which was only in passing, she was talking and laughing, which would shew it in its full dimensions, and she says she could see no other feature; but we are assured she is extremely good-natured, very lively, and has an extraordinary understanding. The first part, her youth renders probable; for the last article, we may rather suppose it affords a reasonable ground for expectation than that it has come to any perfection. She has been learning French since she knew she was to leave Mecklenburgh; and I suppose must have endeavoured to obtain some English, as the more necessary thing. It is said that Lord Hardwicke wrote over an account to his wife of her personal defects, which her ladyship read in a large company. This was repeated to his Majesty, who is greatly offended. Certainly, it was highly imprudent in the one, and not less foolish in the other; and I wonder his lordship, after having been married near thirty years, should not know his wife better than to put it in her power to commit such a folly, as he might have known how likely she was to use it to his disadvantage. I suppose the poor man went over in full expectation of seeing a Venus, and was so amazed that he could not contain his disappointment.

“As many persons as Greenwich would hold waited there for many days to see her Majesty arrive, and at last, after having been exposed to those storms, she landed in Suffolk, and, consequently, did not make her appearance on the Thames. The rooms at Greenwich let for half a guinea a day, and the poorest little casement brought in the owner a daily crown. I hope it has enriched many poor people. Of all the taxes ever levied in this kingdom, that which will be raised this year on folly will be by far the highest. I hear there is scaffolding enough erected against the coronation to hold two millions of people. Almost all the kingdom will be in London; and many, I suppose, will be reduced to scanty meals for a whole year to come, by the expenses on this occasion; and if the day should prove rainy, which the season of the year renders very probable, those who are not in Westminster Hall or the Abbey will see nothing; for there is an awning prepared, to be carried over the heads of those who walk in the procession, in case of rain. The finery of every one who intends to appear at court is beyond imagination. This kingdom, or perhaps any other, scarcely ever saw the like.

“The queen’s clothes are so heavy that, by all accounts, if she be not very robust, she will not be able to move under the burden; but I hope her constitution is not very delicate, for she did not arrive in London till three o’clock; and, besides the fatigue of her journey, with the consequences of the flutter she could not avoid being in, she was to dress for her wedding, be married, have a Drawing-room, and undergo the ceremony of receiving company, after she and the king were in bed, and all the night after her journey and so long a voyage. Nothing but a German constitution could have undergone it.” ...

Poor Queen Charlotte’s plainness was—as Northcote subsequently described it, in speaking of her portrait by Reynolds, namely—an elegant, and not a vulgar plainness. She had a beautifully shaped arm, and was fond of exhibiting it. “She had a fan in her hand,” said Northcote; “Lord! how she held that fan!” Of literary news this letter contains the following item:

“... Doctor Young has written a poem on ‘Resignation,’ and dedicated it to Mrs. Boscawen. I have not seen it, but have heard it much praised, and am told he wrote it at the desire of my sister Montagu and Miss Carter, who requested it in a visit they made him on their road to Tunbridge, where my sister spent the summer.”

Municipal authorities, more gallant than Mrs. Scott and the female critics, spoke of the queen, in their addresses, as “amiably eminent for the beauties of her mind and person.” Many parties who drove into town to witness the coronation, were made to “stand and deliver” their valuables by highwaymen, who infested all the roads leading into London. Those who escaped and got as far as Charing Cross, could go no further, unless the gentlemen fought way for their ladies and themselves, which some bold spirits ventured to do. While the great show was in progress, press-gangs picked up youths likely, however unwilling, to serve the king; and the city at night was in the hands of a mob, which did with London, Londoners, and their possessions very much as they pleased. Many lives were sacrificed, and very little was thought of them.

The night after the wedding, there was a ball at court, so grand that nothing like it, so it was said, had ever been seen in England. The king and queen retired at the early hour of eleven. One great feature of the night was that the Duke of Ancaster, whose wife was mistress of the robes to the queen, appeared in the dress which the king had worn the whole day before at the coronation, and which his Majesty had condescendingly given to his Grace! A pleasanter feature was to be seen in the group of bridesmaids, who “danced in the white-boddiced coats they had worn at the wedding.” Liquor and illuminations prevailed outside. “Ah!” said an observant Smithfield dealer; “what with plays, fairs, pillories, and executions, London has more holidays than there are red days in the almanack!” In truth, London was drunk and rampant. It could be both at small outlay; for mutton was selling at one shilling a stone (in the carcase), and cognac could be had for nine shillings a gallon!

Lord Hardwicke, named in the above letter, was the son of an attorney, and rose to the dignity of lord chancellor by his merits. When he was plain Philip Yorke, he made an offer of marriage to an heiress, a young widow, with a jointure, whose father asked him for his rent-roll! The handsome barrister replied that he had “a perch of ground in Westminster Hall.” The young fellow’s suit prevailed; and the happy couple began life in a small house near Lincoln’s Inn, the ground floor of which served for the husband’s offices. The lady was connected with the family of Gibbon the historian; and she was a wife so good, prudent, and so wise, that Mrs. Scott’s sneer at her seems quite gratuitous. The poor lady died three days before the coronation; and her husband in 1764.

Doctor Young’s “Resignation” was the dying song of a man above fourscore. Its object was to console Mrs. Boscawen for the loss of her heroic husband, the admiral. In the last century, English heroes were singularly respected. The Suffolk ladies, of whatever rank, voluntarily yielded precedence to Mrs. Vernon, “great Admiral Vernon’s” wife.

Mr. Pitt resigned the foreign secretaryship on October 5, 1761. He and his friends were for declaring war against Spain. Lord Bute and a majority opposed it, the king agreeing with them. Pitt’s fall was made tolerable by the pension of £3,000 a year for the lives of himself, son, and wife. The latter was created Baroness of Chatham; and in three months war was declared with Spain!

Mrs. Scott to her brother at Naples. November 28, 1761.—“... Lord Bath and Lord Lyttelton were both at Tunbridge, and Miss Carter was with my sister; so, you may imagine, the place was agreeable, and wit flowed more copiously than the spring. The room she has so long been fitting-up is not yet finished, but the design of it is so much improved that I really believe it will be the most beautiful thing ever seen, and proportionably expensive. Taste, you know, is not the cheapest thing to purchase. Use and convenience may be provided for at a moderate charge, but great geniuses are above being contented with such matters.

“I suppose you have heard much of the general lamentations for Mr. Pitt’s resignation. It is by many thought that his resuming his post is unavoidable, and, indeed, I suppose it must be so, if affairs take the turn which appearances give reason to expect. He is more popular than ever in the city. The procession of the royal family on the Lord Mayor’s Day was broke in a manner that puzzled people much, as they could not account for it; but it has since been said it was occasioned by a multitude of sailors, who forced their way through the crowd in search of Mr. Pitt’s chariot, from which they intended to have taken the horses, and to have drawn it themselves to the Mansion House. The post of honour is not often a place of safety, but I think it was seldom more dangerous than it would have proved in this case, had they effected their design; but they could not find him, so he got there with whole bones, and was received with greater acclamations than were bestowed on any other person. He endeavoured to get away privately, but the mob were so very kind that they very near overturned Lord Temple’s chariot, in which he was, by crowding about it, and hanging on the doors; and a very long time he was in getting home. I will not say it was tedious, for the sweetest music is deserved praise. He did not attend the House of Commons till some days after its first meeting; but when he did, spoke, by all accounts, beyond what he or any other man ever did, with perfect calmness and modesty, and, with few words, silenced every one who endeavoured to oppose him. G. Grenville attempted to answer him, but a general buz obliged him to sit down. However, the press is loaded with his abuse. These events are happy for hireling scribblers. They get a dinner, and can do him no essential harm. So it’s very well. It would be cruel to grudge them their morsel. I hope it will fatten many a starving author.

“But to mention those who do not write for bread, and those who contrive to get both bread and fame together, Lord Lyttelton’s second volume quarto of ‘Henry the Second,’ is in the press.... Mallett has published a poem called ‘Truth in Rhyme,’ dedicated to Lord Bute.... I am glad he can tell truth in either rhyme or prose.... I have heard a bon mot of Lady Townshend’s, of which no one will deny the truth. Somebody expressed their surprise that Lady Northumberland should be made lady of the bedchamber. ‘Surely,’ said she, ‘nothing could be more proper. The queen does not understand English, and can anything be more necessary than that she should learn the vulgar tongue?’”

It was at this period that Mrs. Scott became an authoress, in whole or in part, of a successful, but now utterly forgotten, novel, called “Millennium Hall.” This book, a single volume, went through four editions. In the first edition, 1762, the first word of the title is spelt throughout with one n, and in all the editions it is said to be by a gentleman on his travels. Common report assigned the authorship to Mrs. Scott, shared, as far as some small help went, by her friend and companion for years, Lady Barbara Montagu. A copy of the second edition (1764), which once belonged to Horace Walpole, is now in the British Museum. On the back of the title-page, Walpole corrects the above sharing of literary labour in the following words, written in his well-known hand: “This book was written by Lady Bab Montagu (the sister of George Montagu Dunk, Earl of Hallifax) and Mrs. Scott, daughter of Matthew Robinson, Esq., and wife of George Scott, Esq.” It was continued to be published as the work of a gentleman, in the two succeeding editions; but Mrs. Scott is still accredited with the greatest share in the labour. “Millennium Hall” is generally described as a novel. It is a series of stories of the romantic lives of four or five ladies who, having been bitterly disappointed in love, and handsomely solaced by riches, retire from the world and establish themselves in the hall which gives its name to the novel. It is a name which would lead one to suppose that there is a sort of millennium peace and happiness achieved there, such as will be found on earth generally only in the millennium period. The wealthy and love-lorn ladies of the hall, however, have only founded a female school and society in advance of contemporary ideas, but having nothing wonderful, though now and then something eccentric, if weighed by our present standards. The real interest of the volume lies in the romantic biographies, and these are narrated with ladylike grace, elegance, tenderness, and, occasionally, tedious prolixity.

The story represented, with some exaggeration, the lives led by Lady Bab and Mrs. Scott in their “conventual house” at Batheaston. Both boys and girls were well trained by those ladies at that place. Mrs. Montagu, in reference to Mrs. Scott’s good works, so loved her sister as to render her uncharitable to other people. “Methodist ladies,” she said, “did out of enthusiasm what Mrs. Scott did out of a calm sense of duty, and gratitude that the employment was a solace to one who had been cruelly tried by affliction.” No credit was given to poor Lady Bab, but her happy temperament could well afford to do without it. Strange as the stories were which illustrate “Millennium Hall,” they were not nearly so strange as one which, in March, 1762, Mrs. Scott related to her brother at Rome, in a letter from Bath: “Those who deal in the small wares of scandal will not want subjects. Miss Hunter, daughter to Orby Hunter, has lately furnished a copious topic.... She and Lord Pembroke, in spite of winds, waves, and war, left this kingdom for one where they imagined they may love with less molestation,—where they cannot see a wife weep nor hear a father rage. They set off in a storm better suited to travelling witches than flying lovers, but were so impeded by the weather, that a captain sent out a boat and took the lady prisoner; but after he had set her on shore, he found that, as she was of age, it was difficult to assume any lawful authority over her; and, after having spent a night in tears and lamentation, she was restored to Lord Pembroke.... His lordship resigned his commission and his place of lord of the bedchamber, and wrote a letter to Lady Pembroke, acknowledging her charms and virtues and his own baseness (an unnecessary thing, since the latter she must long have known, and was probably not absolutely ignorant of the former), but assuring her Miss Hunter was irresistible; that he never intended to return into England, and had taken care that £5,000 should be paid her yearly. As Lady Pembroke is so handsome and amiable, perhaps his conduct will be seen by the world in a true light, without any fashionable palliations. A report was spread, that they were taken by a privateer, but I can hear of none but of a very different capture—the clay cold corpses of Lord and Lady Kingstone, which were on their way to England for interment.”

The elopement of Miss Hunter (a maid of honour, too!) from Bath with the Earl of Pembroke formed one of the most delicious bits of scandal ever discussed in the Rooms, on the Parade, or in the Meadows. The excitement attendant thereon was shared by the whole country; for Kitty Hunter was a well-known, and not at all suspected, beauty of the day. Her father, Orby Hunter, was, at the time of the elopement, one of the lords of the admiralty. The vessel that brought back the fugitives was a privateer, commanded by a friend of Mr. Hunter’s. Kitty’s father declined to receive her, and she accompanied Lord Pembroke abroad. The earl was a married man. His wife was Elizabeth, daughter of the Duke of Marlborough. Her exemplary husband wrote to her from Italy a letter, in which he politely informed her, that though he had lived with her so many years, he regretted to say he had never been able to love her so well as she deserved, so thought it best to leave her. Subsequently, he had the assurance to invite Lady Pembroke to accompany them on the Continent. “And she,” says Walpole, “who is all gentleness and tenderness, was with difficulty withheld from acting as mad a part from goodness as he had acted from guilt and folly.” He had tried to make his wife hate him, but in vain. It is one of the illustrations of social feeling in the last century, that neither the rascal earl nor the light-o’-love maid of honour was thought much the worse of for their shameless conduct. A “Peerage,” of ten years subsequent to the elopement, edited by a clergyman, too! the Rev. Frederick Barlow, vicar of Burton, thus speaks of my lord, who was then living: “His lordship distinguished himself in the annals of gallantry with Miss H—— about ten years ago, and since that time,” it, goes on to speak plainly of the earl’s gallantry, “with several ladies of less note;” adding, “his lordship is universally esteemed as an accomplished nobleman and a brave officer.” Mrs. Scott happily goes on to treat of a plainer but much honester woman than Kitty Hunter: “The queen gives daily less satisfaction, and the people who at first found her out to be pleasing, seem now to be insensible to the discovery they then made. Her husband, however, seems fond of her.... Report says the Prince of Mecklenburg, a very pretty sort of man, with an agreeable person, is fallen desperately in love with Miss Bowes—a prudent passion; and the girl has no ambition if she does not choose to be a princess. I fancy, should she become such, he would be richer than the duke, his elder brother.... Lady Raymond is going to be married to Lord Robert Bertie,—an union wherein no acid will enter; for they are both famed for good temper. Mr. Whitehead’s play has been acted and published, and a poor performance it is. The dialogue flat and ungenteel, and the plot poor enough.”

Whitehead’s play was a comedy, “The School for Lovers,” in which Garrick played Sir John Dorilant. The main attraction was the ever youthful Mrs. Cibber, who, at nearly fifty years old, acted Cælia, a girl of seventeen; yet Victor says: “She was admitted by the nicest observers to become the character. This was entirely owing to that uncommon symmetry and exact proportion in her form, that happily remained with her to her death.” But there were more extraordinary comedies being enacted in real life than on the stage.

In a letter from Mrs. Scott to her brother, at Naples, dated April 10, 1762, there are profuse congratulations on the birth of his son, and a wonderful amount of speculation on mothers, nurses, and on babies generally, possible and impossible, expected and not expected, overtardy or too hasty, and all in as plain language as the subject could admit. The writer then refers to the report of the queen affording promise of an heir; “but as she is no great favourite with the nation, it does not seem to afford any great joy.” This leads to a subject that made a stir among last century ladies who were privileged to go to court. “A court dress (sic) is going to take place at St. James’s, the same as in France, which greatly distresses the old ladies, who are quite clamourous on the occasion, and at a loss how to cover so much neck as the stiffened-bodied gowns are made to show, and which they are sensible is not very appétissante after a certain age; as likewise how to supply the deficiency which churlish time has made in their once flowing tresses. Some younger ladies, to whom nature has been rather a stepdame than a kind mother, join in their lamentations, and London is in an uproar. The exultation of those who, conscious of their charms, rejoice in laying aside as much covering as possible, being as little silent at the distress of the others. They look on this allowed display as a sort of jail delivery to their long-imprisoned attractions; and as beauty is nature’s boast, insist that it should be showed at courts, and feasts and high solemnities, where most may wonder at the workmanship; and that fashion has been hitherto unjust in concealing part of the superiority nature has bestowed upon them. The consumption of pearl-powder will certainly be much increased; for where there is such a resource, even fourscore will exhibit a snowy breast, and the corpulent dowagers will unite the lilies of the spring with all the copious abundance of a later season.

“... Lord Pembroke, after he got to Holland, wrote to his lady, to desire her to come to them, assuring her Miss Hunter would be assiduous in her endeavours to oblige her, and that they should form a very happy society, if she would bring over her guitar, two servants who play on the French horn, and his dog Rover! This polite invitation she, Emma like, was exceeding ready to comply with, but the Duke of Marlborough had rather too much sense to permit it. His lordship has since written her word, he shall never be happy till he lives with her again. Absurd as all this is, it is certainly fact, and some add, that he has advised Miss Hunter to turn nun! To be sure he best knows how fit she is to take a vow of chastity! That he may by this time wish she would take any vow that might separate her from him, is, I think, very probable.”

The general scramble for honours which usually marks a new reign had not yet ceased. Mrs. Scott thus refers to the part which some of her own family took in it.

Mrs. Scott to the Reverend W. Robinson. May 26, 1762.—“I cannot forbear wishing you could have an Irish bishopric, but your profession are too watchful to suffer such things to be vacant. I hear our cousin Robinson does not much like his promotion to Kildare. I suppose he does not entirely relish rising step by step. All travelling is expensive, and I believe none more so than the passing through the various stages of bishoprics; but I think he may be contented to rise à petits pas. His rising at all seems to proceed only from a want of anything to stop him, according to the philosophical axiom, that put a thing in motion and it will move for ever, if it meets with nothing to obstruct its course. Nature went but a slow pace when she made him, and did not jump into one perfection. Sir Septimus is tolerably contented with his fate in a world so regardless of real merit, and therefore little likely to reward his superlative merits. I hear that a week before he had this black rod given him (a proper reward for a preceptor), he declared that whoever would eat goose at court must swallow the feathers; but now they have been so well stroked down, he finds them go down easily enough.”

In a subsequent letter to her sister-in-law at Naples, Mrs. Scott lightly sketches a celebrated character at Bath.

“This place is by no means full, but it contains much wealth. Colonel Clive, the Nabob maker (is not that almost as great a title as the famous Earl of Warwick’s?), lives at Westgate House, with all the Clives about him. He has sold his possessions in India to the East India Company for £30,000 per annum, a trifling sum, which he dedicates to the buying of land. In a time when property is so fluctuating, I think he may see himself possessor of the whole kingdom, should his distempers allow him a long life; but his health is bad, and he purposes, when peace is made, at latest, to show at Rome the richest man in Europe. He lives in little pomp; moderate in his table, and still more so in equipage and retinue.”

Mrs. Scott now disappears for awhile, to make way for her more celebrated sister.

CHAPTER V.

The first letter of Mrs. Montagu’s in the hitherto unpublished series is addressed “To Mr. Robinson,” the writer’s brother. It is dated from “London, 28th of May, 1762.” Mr. Robinson was then residing at Naples, where his wife had recently given birth to a son. After the usual congratulations, Mrs. Montagu says: “I would have answered your letter the day after I received it, but was obliged to wait for the letter of recommendation to Mr. Pitt. Neither Lord Lyttelton or the Bishop of Carlisle are related to or acquainted with Mr. Pitt. Their sister married a distant cousin of Mr. George Pitt’s, and was parted from him, I believe, long before Mr. George Pitt was a man, and they have not ever had the least commerce with him.” After this explanation, the writer refers to the news of the day, and to one of the leading men of the time: “The Duke of Newcastle is about to resign his office and retire to the joys of private life. I am afraid he will find that the mind used to business does not find quiet in idleness. There is hardly a greater misfortune than to have the mind much accustomed to the tracasseries of the world. A country gentleman can amuse himself by angling in a trout-stream, or venturing his neck in a fox-chase; a studious man can enjoy his books in solitude, and, with tranquill pleasure, ‘woo lone quiet in her silent walk;’ but chiefs out of war and statesmen out of place, like all animals taken out of their proper climate, make a miserable affair of rural life. I dare say his Grace of Newcastle will fall to serpentizing rivers, and then wish himself again a fisher of men. Aurora may put on her finest robe to unbar the gates of Morn; he will still sigh that his folding doors are not open to a crowded levée. The notes of Philomel are not sweet to ears used to flattery; and what is the harvest home to a man used to collect the treasure of England?

“The king has purchased Buckingham House, and is going to fit it up elegantly for his retired hours. Her majesty promises to give us an heir very soon. Princess Amelia has purchased Gunnersbury House. The Duke of Portland died about ten days ago, and the Duke of Manchester last week.

“There has been a cold and fever in town, as universal as a plague, but, thank God! less fatal. Mr. Montagu had it violently, and we had ten servants sick at the same time. This distemper is not yet over. It grows more fatal, but I hope we shall have some rain, which will probably put a stop to it.... My poor friend Mrs. Donellan dyed of it the day before yesterday. She had been ill all the winter, and was unable to struggle with a new distemper.... We propose to go to Sandleford very soon, and I hope to have my sister Scott’s company there, which will make me very happy. Lady Bab Montagu has lost her sister, Lady Charlotte Johnson, who dyed in childbed.

“Lord Hallifax is returned with great glory from his Lord Lieutenancy in Ireland. He pleased all people; he united all parties; he contented those he was sent by and those he was sent to; and has shown it is possible to please the government and to be popular there.... I suppose you have heard of the death of Sir Edward Dering, which was sudden. He has entailed everything on his grandson, and left but very small fortune to his younger children. People seem to think that by making one person in their family rich, they can make one very happy; but alas! human happiness cannot be carried beyond a certain pitch. Competency will make every one easy: great wealth cannot make any one happy. It is strange, parents should seem to feel only for one child, or, indeed, that the heir should be dearer than the child; for it is as heir they show their regards to one of the family. No personal merit, no tender attachment, no sympathy of disposition can overrule that circumstance. Sir Edward Dering dyed very rich....

“Mr. Harrison’s watch” (the fourth and most perfect time-keeper, for ascertaining the longitude at sea, invented by the Yorkshire carpenter’s son, by which he ultimately received £24,000) “has succeeded beyond expectation; navigation will be improved by it, which all who have the spirit of travelling shall rejoice at. The wives of some of our general officers are gone to Lisbon with their husbands, which I tell you for the honour of the fair sex. Lord Anson is in a very bad state of health. I am told Rome is the best place so get books at; I should be glad to have Muratori ‘Sopra le cose delli secoli passi.’ I have his ‘Annals of Italy.’ ... My love to my sister and dear little godson.... Pray remember, you owe me a goddaughter still.”

Mrs. Scott’s letter in June, to Mr. W. Robinson, has two passages in it which are like notes to her sister’s epistle.

“You will find few commoners in England. We make nobility as fast as people make kings and queens on Twelfth Night, and almost as many.... Lady Townshend says, she dare not spit out of her window for fear of spitting on a lord.”

“.... The Duke of Newcastle, after his resignation, had a very numerous levée, but somebody observed to him, there were but two bishops, present. He is said to have replied, that bishops like other men, were too apt to forget their maker. I think this has been said for him, or the resignation of power has much brightened his understanding; for of whatever he may be accused, the crime of wit was never laid to his charge.”

Walpole states, with regard to the prelates at the old duke’s levée: “As I suppose all bishops are prophets, they foresee that he will never come into place again; for there was but one that had the decency to take leave of him, after crowding his rooms for forty years together: it was Cornwallis.” The duke went out on finding he had no chance of carrying a pecuniary aid to Prussia. If he was almost a fool, as some kind friends said, he had the wisdom to keep in place longer than any of his contemporaries. He was succeeded as Prime Minister by Lord Bute. Cornwallis, Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, reaped the reward of his fidelity. He was promoted to the Archbishopric of Canterbury in 1768. It should be added to the honour of the duke, who, however mentally ill-endowed and eccentric, was a gentleman in practice, that he declined a pension on his retirement. He might be incapable of serving his country, he said, but England should certainly not find him a burthen. Chesterfield cites, as an example of his timidity, the duke’s childish fear at Lord Chesterfield’s bill for correcting the calendar, and, as a proof of his integrity, the fact that “he retired from business above four hundred thousand pounds poorer than when he engaged in it.”

The duke left “business” in a considerable amount of confusion. In a letter dated July 27, 1762, Mrs. Scott writes to Mr. Robinson at Rome, after much small talk on babies and jokes on prophesied lyingsin, in these words:

“Political disputes never ran so high in print as at present. The periodical papers are numerous and abusive to the greatest degree. By what I hear, the lawyers find it some substitution for the decay of business in the courts; for the minority papers regularly undergo the inspection of council learned in the law before they are published, that the authors who stand on the very verge of treason may not, by some inadvertency, make a faux pas that will throw them down the precipice; and some persons of consequence are under engagements to the printer to indemnify him should the heavy hand of authority oppress him....

“... The king has given Johnson a pension of £300 per annum,—a necessary step for one who wishes to be thought the patron of literature, and what every one must approve.”

The North Briton was not of Mrs. Scott’s opinion with regard to Johnson’s merits. “I hope,” says Wilkes (No. 11, August 14th), “Johnson is a writer of reputation, because, as a writer, he has just got a pension of £300 per annum. I hope, too, that he has become a friend to this constitution and the family on the throne, now he is thus nobly provided for; but I know he has much to unwrite, more to unsay, before he will be forgiven by the true friends of the present illustrious family for what he has been writing and saying for many years.”

In the last-named month, occurred that great event, the birth of “the first gentleman in Europe.” Mrs. Scott thus speaks of mother and child:

August 13, 1762. Mrs. Scott to Mrs. Robinson, Rome.—“On Thursday, the queen was brought to bed of a son, and both, we are told, are well. Many rejoiced, but none more than those who have been detained during all this hot weather in town to be present at the ceremony. Among them, no one was more impatient than the Chancellor, who, not considering any part of the affair as a point of law, thought his presence very unnecessary. His lordship and the Archbishop must have had a fatiguing office; for, as she was brought to bed at 7 in the morning, they must have attended her labour all night, for fear they should be absent at the critical moment of delivery. I wish they were not too much out of humour before the prince was born, to be able to welcome it properly.... The lady’s person is not the only thing that displeased. There is a coarseness and vulgarity of manners that disgust much more. She does not seem to choose to fashion herself at all.... Ned Scott’s wife is to suckle the Prince of Wales—an employment which in all probability will prove as good nourishment to her own family as to the royal babe; for her numerous offspring can scarcely fail of being provided for after she has served in such an office.

“... Peace is being much talked of, tho’ the terms are unknown. The Duke of Bedford is spoken of as the person who is to go to Paris to transact it. I hope much will not depend on secret articles; for I think he gave a proof, when old Bussy was here, that his old nurse could not be a greater blab!”

The chancellor who was present on the above occasion was “cursing Lord Northington,”—a coarse, witty man, married to a fool, who became the mother of the witty Lady Bridget Fox Lane. Northington, like Newcastle, had his fling at the bishops. In serious illness, he was counselled to send for a certain prelate. “He will never do,” said the patient. “I should have to confess that I committed my heaviest sin when I made him a bishop!” The primate who attended at the birth of the Prince of Wales was Secker; and as he was originally a dissenter, and was never baptised in the Church of England, there were anxious church-women who thought that his christening George Prince of Wales would never make a Christian of him. And it can’t be said that it did! Meanwhile, how things were otherwise going in England, Mrs. Scott relates to her brother, in Rome, in a letter dated September, 1762.

“The lowest artificer thinks now of nothing but the constitution of the government.... The English always seemed born politicians, but were never so universally mad on the subject as at present. If you order a mason to build an oven, he immediately inquires about the progress of the peace, and descants on the preliminaries. A carpenter, instead of putting up a shelf to a cupboard, talks of the Princess Dowager, of Lord Treasarre, and of secretaries of state. Neglected lie the trowel and the chisel; the mortar dries and the glue hardens while the persons who should use them are busied with dissertations on the government.

“... The Duke of Marlborough and Lady Caroline Russell were married eight and forty hours after his grace declared himself a lover. The Duke of Bedford was always known to be a man of business, but he never despatched a matter quicker than this. He gave to Lady Caroline £50,000 down, and is to give as much more at his death.”

The next letter, written at Sandleford, October the 8th, 1762, is addressed to the writer’s sister-in-law, “Mrs. Robinson, Recommendé à Monsieur Jenkins, Gentilhome Anglois au Caffé Anglois, sur la Place di Espana, Rome.” It commences with “My dear Madam,” and after a very prolix argument on the lack of interest in home news sent to travellers abroad, Mrs. Montagu refers with pride to the English triumphs at the Havanna and Martinico, and thus continues.... “But we are not much the nearer to a peace; for, as ambition subsides or crouches in the House of Bourbon, it rises in the Court of Aldermen, in London. When we shut the Temple of Janus, we shut up the trade of Change Alley, and the city finds its account in a war, and they clamour against any peace that will not give us the commerce of the whole world!...

“We have lately had a very fine public ceremony, the instalment of the new Knights of the Garter at Windsor. The king, assuming the throne of sovereign of the order, gave great lustre to the spectacle. I should have liked to have seen so august a ceremony; and my Lord Bath was so good as to ask me to go to Windsor with him, from his house at Maidenhead Bridge; but Mr. Montagu, not being fond of public shows, and apprehending his lordship offered to go out of complaisance, I declined it, and my lord spent three days here; so it was plain, his politeness to us was his only inducement to go to the instalment. I must own I should have taken some pleasure in being led back into former ages and the days of our great Plantagenets. I have a reverence, too, for the institutions of Chivalry. The qualities of a Knight were valour, liberality, and courtesy, and to be sans peur et sans reproche. And though the change of government and manners make this knightly character now appear a little extravagant, the Redresser of wrongs was a respectable title before a regular police and a good system of laws secured the rights and properties of the weak. I hear the late instalment was extremely brilliant. The helmets of the knights were adorned with gems; military honours, indeed, did not sit proudly on their crests; but if they have the virtues suited to the times we live in, we will be contented. The knights of Edward ye Third were, indeed, very great men. The assembly of British Worthies might have disputed personal merit with, perhaps, the greatest Heroes of antiquity, considering them singly and independently; but to enjoy an extensive or a lasting fame, men’s actions must be tyed to great events; then they swim down Fate’s innavigable tyde, otherwise, they soon sink into oblivion.”...

In the February of this year, 1762, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had returned to England, after many years of absence. In October, in the same year, she died. Of her appearance on her return, Mrs. Montagu wrote as follows to her sister-in-law at Naples:

February 16, 1762.—“You have lately returned to us from Italy a very extraordinary personage, Lady Mary Wortley. When Nature is at the trouble of making a very singular person, Time does right in respecting it. Medals are preserved, when common coin is worn out; and as great geniuses are rather matters of curiosity than of art, this lady seems reserved to be a wonder for more than our generation. She does not look older than when she went abroad, has more than the vivacity of fifteen, and a memory which, perhaps, is unique. Several people visited her out of curiosity, which she did not like. I visit her because her cousin and mine were cousin-germans. Though she has not any foolish partiality for her husband or his relations, I was very graciously received, and you may imagine entertained, by one who neither thinks, speaks, acts or dresses like anybody else. Her domestick is made up of all nations, and when you get into her drawing-room, you imagine you are in the first story of the Tower of Babel. An Hungarian servant takes your name at the door: he gives it to an Italian, who delivers it to a Frenchman; the Frenchman to a Swiss, and the Swiss to a Polander; so that, by the time you get to her ladyship’s presence, you have changed your name five times, without the expense of an act of parliament.”

In October, the same writer thus wrote of Lady Mary’s death, and of the son who survived his mother:

“Lady Mary Wortley Montagu returned to England, as it were, to finish where she began. I wish she had given us an account of the events that filled in the space between. She had a terrible distemper; the most virulent cancer I ever heard of, which carried her off very soon. I met her at Lady Bute’s in June, and she then looked well. In three weeks, at my return to London, I heard she was given over. The hemlock kept her drowsy and free from pain; and the physicians thought if it had been given early, might possibly have saved her. She left her son one guinea. He is too much of a sage to be concerned about money, I presume. When I first knew him, a rake and a beau, I did not imagine he would addict himself at one time to Rabbinical learning, and then travel all over the East, the great Itinerant Savant of the World. One has read that the believers in the transmigration of souls suppose a man, who has been rapacious and cunning, does penance in the shape of a fox. Another, cruel and bloody, enters the body of a wolf; but I believe my poor cousin, in his pre-existent state, having broken all moral laws, has been sentenced to suffer in all the various characters of human life. He has run through them all unsuccessfully enough. His dispute with Mr. Needham has been communicated to me by a gentleman of the Museum, and I think he will gain no laurels there; but he speaks as decisively as if he had been bred in Pharaoh’s court, in all the learning of the Egyptians. He has certainly very uncommon parts, but too much of the rapidity of his mother’s genius.

“... I am sure my brother will be glad to hear that Mrs. Scott, of Scottshall, is wet-nurse to our Prince of Wales, and is much liked by our king and royal family; so that I hope she will be able to make interest to establish all her children. A little of the royal favour and protection will bring them forward in professions, and the girls may have little places in the household; and I hope the scheme which I forwarded to the utmost of my power, will save an ancient, honourable family from ruin. She is vastly pleased and happy in her situation, and her royal nursling is as fine and healthy a child as can be.

“... I have rambled a good deal this summer, much to my amusement and the amendment of Mr. Montagu’s health, who was greatly out of order in the spring. We went to Lord Lyttelton’s in Worcestershire, with a large party consisting of my Lord Bath, Mr. and Mrs. Vesey, and Doctor Monsey. Lord Lyttelton had his daughter, his sister, Mrs. Hood, and the Bishop of Carlisle (his brother) with him, so we made a pretty round family. The weather was fine, and the place is delightful beyond all description. I should do it wrong, if I were to attempt to describe it. Its beauties are summed up in the lines of my favourite Italian poet:

“‘Culte pianure e delicati colli,

Chiare acqe, ombrose ripe, e prati molli.’

These lines seem to have been written for Hagley; but, besides these soft beauties, it has magnificent prospects of distant mountains, and hills shaded with wood. The house is magnificent and elegant; we had several agreeable entertainments of musick in different parts of the Park, and adapted to the scenes. In some places, the French horns reverberated from hill to hill. In the shady parts near the cascades, the soft musick was concealed and seemed to come from the unseen genius of the wood. We were all in great spirits, and enjoyed the amusements prepared for us. Mr. Montagu grew better every day, by the air and exercise, and returned to London quite well, though he had been much pulled down by the fashionable cold called l’influenza.

“... He carried me to see Oxford, which, indeed, I had been at before; but when there are so many cities built for trade and commerce, it is always so pleasant to me to see there are places dedicated to the improvement of the human mind and the nobler commerce with the Muses; and tho’ it is easy to find fault in everything, yet I think these places of education and study must have been of great service in advancing the noblest interests of mankind, the improvement of knowledge, and harmonizing the mind.

“We went to Blenheim, which I saw with great pleasure, as the monument of England’s foreign glory and national gratitude. In our return to town, we saw Warwick Castle, the seat of the great Neville, surnamed ‘the Make-King.’ We visited his tomb and the monuments of Beauchamps, Nevilles, and Brookes. I walked an hour under some trees, on a beautiful terrass where Lord Brooke and Sir Philip Sydney used to take their morning’s walk, blending, I dare say, as in his ‘Arcadia,’ Wisedom of state and schemes of great enterprize with rural talk.

“In our next stage, we saw Kenilworth Castle, once the strong place of Simon de Montfort, since the seat of the Earl of Leicester. He entertained Queen Elizabeth there in all the pageantry of the old times of chivalry. From the lake a lady came, who told the queen, in rude rhime, that she had been confined there ever since the days of Merlin, but her majesty’s power had set her free. The lake is now dry’d up. The place no longer belongs to ambition or luxury. Laughing Ceres re-assumed the land, and what the proud rebel and the assuming favorite left is enjoy’d by a farmer. There are great remains of the stately castle, made more venerable by the finest ivy I ever saw. I could wish this object placed rather at the edge of a bleak mountain, and that it frowned on a desert, but it unhappily overlooks a sweet pastoral scene; however, the memory of the illustrious persons it has belonged to gives the mind that serious solemn, disposition its situation wants.

“But you who walk on classic ground will despise my Gothick antiquities. I will own my Nevilles and Montforts dare not stand equal with your Gracchi, nor my Earl of Leicester with any of the favorites of Augustus; but, perhaps, to the rough virtues and untamed valour of these potent rebels, we owe part of our present liberty and happiness, and even our taste for the venerable remains of ancient Rome.... I desire my most affectionate love to my brother; and to my nephew and godson, my best wishes; and I desire he will be a Roman, not an Italian. I beg to go back as far as before the ruin of Carthage for his morals.” ...

In a fragment of a letter written in 1763, Mrs. Montagu says:

“Miss Hunter has come back in the character of the Fair Penitent. Her lover was soon tired of an engagement which had not the sanctions of virtue and honour. Shame and a fatherless babe she has brought back. I hope her miserable fate will deter adventurous damsels from such experiments.” Kitty Hunter’s fate was far from being miserable. She married Captain Clarke, who became Field Marshal Sir Alured Clarke; and the once audacious maid of honour died in the odour of fashion, A. D. 1810.

In 1764, Mrs. Montagu was an invalid—one who would fulfil the duties of her position, but who was glad to withdraw from them to the repose of Sandleford. Supremely admired as she was in society for the brilliancy of her talents, Mrs. Montagu was seen to the greatest advantage when at home with one or a very few choice friends. After Mrs. Elizabeth Carter had spent some time with her at pleasant Sandleford, she wrote to Mrs. Vesey. “... For most part of the time we were entirely alone.... Our friend, you know, has talents which must distinguish her in the largest circles; but there it is impossible for one fully to discover either the beauties of her character or the extent and variety of her understanding, which always improves on a more accurate examination and on a nearer view.... The charm is inexpressibly heightened when it is complicated with the affections of the heart.” Mr. Pennington, Mrs. Carter’s nephew, and editor of her correspondence, states that those who did not know Mrs. Montagu in her exclusive home character were ignorant of the real charms of her understanding, the strength of her mind, and the goodness of her heart.

One of her great trials visited her this year—the death of her constant and venerated friend, the Earl of Bath. There is no letter in the unpublished collection which bears any reference to Lord Bath’s death—Walpole’s great enemy, and Mrs. Montagu’s most devoted and admiring friend. It would be difficult to say whether this accomplished nobleman, or the good Lord Lyttelton, or the profound Lord Kames, or discerning Burke had the greatest veneration for the mental endowments of Mrs. Montagu. It may be here added, as a sample of one or two other ladies of the last century, that after Lord Bath was a widower, and had been made childless by the loss of his gallant son, unattached ladies made offers of marriage to him, he being one of the wealthiest men of the day. They proposed seriously, like Mrs. Anne Pitt, or by strong innuendo, like Lady Bell Finch. The latter, on Lord Bath returning to her half a crown which he had borrowed, wished he could give her a crown. Lady Bell replied, that though he could not give her a crown, he could give her a coronet, and that she was ready to accept it! Lyttelton celebrated the friendship which existed between Mrs. Montagu, Lord Bath, and himself in 1762, in a little poem called “The Vision.” The noble poet told how a bard appeared to him, and how the minstrel sang of the superiority of the myrtle to the oak, then—

“... closed the bard his mystic song,—his shade

Shrunk from my grasp and into air decay’d,

But left imprinted on my ravish’d view,

The forms of Pult’ney and of Montagu.”

After the earl’s death, his will was as much the subject of conversation as his decease. Chesterfield calculated that, in money and land, he left to the value of £2,400,000, and made his sole legatee the brother, General Pulteney, whom he never loved. “The legacies he has left are trifling; for, in truth, he cared for nobody. The words give and bequeath were too shocking for him to repeat, and so he left all in one word, to his brother.” In 1767 General Pulteney died.

The next letter is dated from Mrs. Montagu’s Northumberland residence, Denton Castle (or Hall), December 7, 1766. It is addressed to Mrs. Robinson, and contains long and premature congratulations on the expected birth of her sister-in-law’s next baby, and then continues: “I am still in the northern regions, but I hope in a fortnight to return to London. We have had a mild season, and this house is remarkably warm, so that I have not suffered from cold. Business has taken up much of my time, and as we had farms to let against next May-day, and I was willing to see the new colliery begin to trade to London before I left the country, I had the prudence to get the better of my taste for society. I had this day the pleasure of a letter from Billingsgate (a polite part of the world for a lady to correspond with) that the first ships which were then arrived were much approved. At Lynne they have also succeeded, and these are the two great coal-markets. So now, as soon as I can get all the ends and bottoms of our business wound up, I shall set out for Hill Street.

“I spent a month in Scotland this summer, and made a further progress than Mr. Gray did. An old friend of Mr. Montagu’s and mine came to us here, and brought his daughter the end of July, and summoned me to keep a promise I had made him, of letting him be my knight-errant and escort me round Scotland.

“The 1st of August we set forward. I called on the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland at Alnwick Castle, in my way. It is the most noble Gothick building imaginable. Its antique form is preserved on the outside. Within the apartments are also Gothick in their structure and ornaments, but convenient and noble; so that modern elegance arranges and conducts antique strength and grandeur, leaves its sublimity of character, but softens what was rude and unpolished.

“My next day’s journey carried me to Edinburgh, where I staid about ten days. I passed my time there very agreeably, receiving every polite attention from all the people of distinction in the town. I never saw anything equal to the hospitality of the Scotch. Every one seemed to make it their business to attend me to all the fine places in the neighbourhood, to invite me to dinner, to supper, etc. As I had declined an invitation to go to Glasgow, the Lord Provost of Glasgow insisted on my coming to his villa near the town, instead of going to a noisy inn. I staid three days there to see the seats in the environs, and the great cathedral, and the college and academy for painting, and then I set out for Inverary. I should first tell you, Glasgow is the most beautiful town in Great Brittain. The houses, according to the Scotch fashion, are large and high, and built of freestone; the streets very broad, and built at right angles. All dirty kinds of business are carried on in separate districts, so that nothing appears but a noble and elegant simplicity.

“My road from Glasgow to Inverary lay by the side of the famous lake called Loughlomon. Never did I see the sublime and beautiful so united. The lake is in some places eight miles broad, in others less; adorned with many islands, of which some rise in a conical figure, and are covered with fir-trees up to the summit. Other islands are flatter. Deer are feeding in their green meadows. In the lontananza rise the mountains, on whose barren breast

“‘The labouring clouds do seem to rest.’

The lake is bright as crystal, and the shore consists of alabaster pebbles. Thus I travelled near twenty miles, till I came to the village of Leess, where I lay at an inn, there being no gentleman’s house near it. The next morning I began to ascend the Highland mountains. I got out of the chaise to climb to the top of one, to take my leave of the beautiful lake. The sun had not been long up; its beams danced on the lake, and we saw this lovely water meandering for twenty-five miles. Immediately after I returned to my chaise, I began to be inclosed in a deep valley between vast mountains, down whose furrowed cheeks torrents rushed impetuously, and united in a river in a vale below. Winter’s rains had so washed away the soil from some of the steep mountains, there appeared little but the rock which, like the skeleton of a giant, appeared more terrible than the perfect form. Other mountains were covered with a dark brown moss. The shaggy goats were browsing on their sides. Here and there appeared a storm-struck tree or blasted shrub, from whence no lark ever saluted the morn with joyous hymn, or Philomel sooth’d the dull ear of night; but from thence the eagle gave the first lessons of flight to her young, and taught them to make war on the kids.

“In the Vale of Glencoe, we stopp’d to dine amidst the rude magnificence of nature rather than in the meanest of the works of art, so did not enter the cottage which called itself an inn. From thence, my servant brought me fresh herrings and bread; and my Lord Provost’s wife had fill’d my maid’s chaise with good things; so very luxuriously we feasted. I wish’d Ossian would have come to us, and told a tale of other times. However, imagination and memory assisted, and we recollected many passages in the very places that inspired them. I staid three hours listening to the roaring stream, and hoped some ghost would come on the blast of the mountain and show us the three grey stones erected to his memory. After dinner, we went on about fourteen miles, still in the valley; mountain rising above mountain till we ascended to Inverary. There we at once entered the vale where lies the vast lake called Lough Fine, of whose dignity I cannot give you a better notion than by telling you the great leviathan had taken his pastime therein the night before I was there. Tho’ it is forty miles from the sea, whales come up there often in the herring season....

“At Inverary, I was lodged at a gentleman’s house, invited to another’s in the neighbourhood, and attended round the Duke of Argylle’s policy (such is called the grounds dedicated to beauty and ornament). I went also to see the castle built by the late duke. It appears small by the vast objects near it. This great lake before—a vast mountain covered with firr and beech behind—it, so that, relatively, the castle is little. I was obliged to return back to Glasgow the same way, not having time to make the tour of the Highlands. Lord Provost had an excellent dinner and good company ready for us. The next day I went to Lord Kames’, near Sterling, where I had promised to stay a day. I pass’d a day very agreeably there, but could not comply with their obliging entreaties to stay a longer time, but was obliged to return to Edinburgh. Lord Kames attended me to Stirling Castle, which is on the road, and from thence to the iron-works at Carron. Then again I was on classical ground. We dined at Mr. Dundass’s. At night, I got back to Edinburgh, where I rested myself three days, and then, on my road, lay at Dr. Gilbert Elliot’s, and spent a day with him and Lady Elliot. They facilitated my journey by lending me relays, which the route did not always furnish; so I sent my own horses a stage forward. I crossed the Tweed again; dined and lay at the Bishop of Carlisle’s, at Rose Castle, and then came home much pleased with the expedition, and grateful for the infinite civilities I had received.

“My evenings at Edinburgh passed very agreeably with Doctor Robertson, Doctor Blair, Lord Kames, and divers ingenious and agreeable persons. My friend, Doctor Gregory, who was my fellow traveller, tho’ he is a mathematician, has a fine imagination, an elegant taste, and every quality to make an agreeable companion.... He came back to Denton with me, but soon left us. I detain’d his two daughters, who are still with us; they are most amiable children....

“I was told Mr. Gray was rather reserved when he was in Scotland, tho’ they were disposed to pay him great respect. I agree perfectly with him, that to endeavour to shine in conversation and to lay out for admiration is very paltry. The wit of the company, next to the butt of the company, is the meanest person in it. But at the same time, when a man of celebrated talents disdains to mix in common conversation, or refuses to talk on ordinary subjects, it betrays a latent pride. There is a much brighter character than that of a wit or a poet, or a savant, which is that of a rational and sociable being, willing to carry on the commerce of life with all the sweetness and condescension decency and virtue will permit. The great duty of conversation is to follow suit, as you do at whist. If the eldest hand plays the deuce of diamonds, let not his next neighbour dash down the king of hearts, because his hand is full of honours. I do not love to see a man of wit win all the tricks in conversation, nor yet to see him sullenly pass. I speak not this of Mr. Gray in particular; but it is the common failing of men of genius to assert a proud superiority or maintain a prouder indolence. I shall be very glad to see Mr. Gray whenever he will be pleased to do me the favour. I think he is the first poet of the age; but if he comes to my fireside, I will teach him not only to speak prose, but to talk nonsense, if occasion be.... I would not have a poet always sit on the proud summit of the forked hill. I have a great respect for Mr. Gray as well as a high admiration.” ...

Whenever Mrs. Montagu got up to ride a simile, there was ground for anxiety on the part of her friends; some among them, too, must have wished that she had called a nightingale a nightingale, and not “philomel.” In travel, however, she saw what she saw, which many travellers never do. She was not at all like the wife of Sir George Cornewall mentioned by Lady Malmesbury, in a letter to her son, written at Chambéry, 1816: “She never looks at anything, but works in the carriage all day long. She will not even go to Chamouni;” or that other lady who, passing through the sublimest of mountain scenery, kept her eyes shut, declaring that it was too beautiful to look at.

CHAPTER VI.

In 1769, the critical state of public affairs drew from Mrs. Montagu the following reflection: “I hope I shall see all my friends safe and well at my return to town; but, indeed, a wicked mob and a foolish ministry may produce strange events. It was better in old times, when the ministry was wicked and the mob foolish.... Ministers, however wicked, do not pull down houses, nor ignorant mobs pull down government. A mob that can read and a ministry that cannot think are sadly matched.”

In truth, however, Mrs. Montagu was engaged during this year on a work which was not only praiseworthy for the motive which induced her to undertake it, but honourable to her for its execution, and it may almost be added, glorious to her personally in its results.

In 1769 Mrs. Montagu published, anonymously, her “Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare.” This work, once widely famous, may still be read with pleasure. It was written in reply to Voltaire’s grossly indecent attack on our national poet. Some previous allusion which he had made to Shakespeare, to show his own learning, had directed the notice of French readers to a new dramatic literature which soon won their admiration. Voltaire’s jealousy induced him to denounce what he had before extolled, and he did this in the spirit of the tiger and the monkey—the component elements, according to his own mendacious saying, of all Frenchmen. He had no deep knowledge of the subject he affected to criticise, and was not made of the stuff that could lead him to feel sympathy with the lofty sentiments, or to be stirred by the searching wit of the greatest of dramatic poets. Voltaire could no more appreciate Shakespeare than he could estimate the divine character of Joan of Arc. If Joan’s own countrymen betrayed her, Voltaire stands foremost among Frenchmen as the beastly polluter of her spotless reputation.

Mrs. Montagu makes the following playful allusion to her authorship, in a letter to Lord Lyttelton, December, 1769: “I am sorry to tell you that a friend of yours is no longer a concealed scribbler. I had better have employed the town crier to proclaim me an author; but, being whispered, it has circulated with incredible swiftness. I hear Mr. Andrew Stone is very indulgent to my performance, which much flatters my vanity. Mr. Melmoth, at Bath, flatters me; but I am most flattered that a brother writer says the book would be very well if it had not too much wit. I thought there had been no wit at all in it; and I am as much pleased as M. Jourdain was when his preceptor told him he spoke prose. If my wit hurts anybody or anything, it is chance-medley—no premeditated malice; neither art nor part has my will therein. I don’t love wit: it is a poor, paltry thing, and fit only for a Merry Andrew.

“I look very innocent when I am attacked about the essay, and say, ‘I don’t know what you mean!’ I shall set about a new edition as soon as your lordship comes to town; for the first thousand is in great part sold, tho’ the booksellers have done me all the prejudice in their power.” The new edition was even more successful than the first.

Mrs. Montagu’s defence may appear a little too apologetic now; but it is marked by good taste, by evidences of deep thought, by flashes of wit, and by the grasp she has, firmly and gracefully, on her subject. She deals with dramatic poetry and the historical drama, examines the first and second parts of “Henry IV.,” treats of the preternatural beings of Shakespeare, and ends by a comparison of “Cinna” and “Julius Cæsar.” If any may differ with her in respect to Corneille, whose third act of “Cinna” is worthy of the great French dramatic poet, no reader will hesitate to praise the earnestness and delicacy with which this Lady of the Last Century has executed her noble task.

A French translation appeared in Paris in 1777—the year before Voltaire died. In England, six editions of the essay were published, the last in 1810. In 1827, it had the honour of being noticed with high praise, by M. Villemain, in his “Nouveaux Mélanges Historiques et Littéraires;” and in 1840, an edition in Italian was published in Florence.

Few English readers had read Voltaire so thoughtfully as Mrs. Montagu, and perhaps none reflected more on what they read than she did, or gave more graceful expression to consequent judgment. One side of Voltaire’s character she described (while the witty Frenchman was preparing his attack on Shakespeare) to Lord Kames.

“Voltaire sent a tragedy to Paris, which he said was composed in ten days. The players sent it back to him to correct. At threescore and ten one should not think his wit would outrun his judgment; but he seems to begin a second infancy in wit and philosophy,—a dangerous thing to one who has such an antipathy to leading-strings.” It was Voltaire’s self-praise that offended Mrs. Montagu as much as his offensive condescension to, and disparagement of, Shakespeare. When she was told that Voltaire had said boastingly: “C’est moi qui autrefois parlai le premier de ce Shakespeare. C’est moi qui le premier montrai aux Français quelques perles que j’avais trouvé dans son fumier.” “Ah!” replied Mrs. Montagu, with great readiness, “C’est un fumier qui a fertilisé une terre bien ingrate.” French fashionable circles, which loved wit and cared not a jot who suffered by it, received and repeated the saying of the accomplished English lady as if it had been ten times more brilliant than it was in reality.

Mrs. Montagu’s defence of Shakespeare was not too tenderly treated by her own friends. All the frankness of friendship was cheerfully given to it. The plain-spoken Dowager Countess Gower thus wrote soon after the appearance of the Vindication:

1769.—“Fortune has blest this forest with the geniuses of the age; Mrs. Montagu, Mrs. Carter, Mrs. Dunbar, etc., etc., and Lord Lyttelton are at Sunning Wells, and sport sentiment from morn till noon, from noon till dewy eve. I molest ’em not; contenting myself in my rustic simplicity. ’Tis a stupidity that may be felt, I don’t doubt, but not by me. Mrs. Montagu has commenced author, in vindication of Shakespeare, who wants none; therefore her performance must be deemed a work of supererogation. Some commend it. I’ll have it, because I can throw it aside when I’m tired.” Johnson treated it with greater brutality. He had once compared Mrs. Montagu with Queen Elizabeth, and had recognized in the former the greater qualifications. Now, he denounced the essay when he had only looked into it. He had taken up an end of the web, and finding packthread, thought it useless, as he said, to go further in search of embroidery. Reynolds thought it did her honour, which Johnson allowed, but he spoiled the admission by asserting that it would do honour to no one else. Garrick said she had pointed out Voltaire’s blunders; to which Johnson replied, that it wasn’t worth while, and that there was no merit in the way of doing it. Subsequently, he declared: “Neither I, nor Beauclerk, nor Mrs. Thrale could get through the book!”—a declaration which was unfounded, as far as Mrs. Thrale was concerned; for she protested that she had read it with pleasure. The great man, in short, talked nonsense, but dressed it in fine words. “There was no real criticism in it,” he said, “showing the beauty of thought, as formed in the workings of the human heart.” Mrs. Montagu did not feel called on to exhibit any such beauty or any such superstructure. She exposed the blundering arrogance of Voltaire, who first praised Shakespeare, for the annoyance of his own countrymen, and then, finding the French inclined to accept the praise, aspersed brutally the poet whom he had pillaged without mercy.

Johnson thought little of Garrick, probably because Garrick approved the object of Mrs. Montagu’s Shakespearian essay, and because the lady gave very high praise to Garrick as an actor. Johnson thought it was fit that she should say much, and that he should say nothing, in Garrick’s praise. Accomplished Bruin, however, said much to the great player’s disparagement. He maintained that Garrick had been overpaid for what he had done for Shakespeare. “Sir, he has not made Shakespeare better known. He cannot illustrate Shakespeare!” When Johnson afterward wrote to Mrs. Thrale, that speaking of “Shakespeare and Nature” rightly brought Mrs. Montagu into his mind, he is supposed to be inconsistent, when he was, it may be, only satirical. He certainly uttered a judgment on the essay, which is not to be gainsaid, when he maintained, according to Mr. Seward, that the work was “ad hominem, conclusive against Voltaire,” and that “she had done, sir, what she intended to do.”

The greatest praise which the essay received was awarded to it by Cowper many years after it was published. Writing on May 27, 1788, to Lady Hesketh, Cowper said: “I no longer wonder that Mrs. Montagu stands at the head of all that is called learned, and that every critic veils his bonnet to her superior judgment. I am now reading and have reached the middle of her essay on the genius of Shakespeare—a book of which, strange as it may seem, though I must have read it formerly, I had absolutely forgot the existence.

“The learning, the good sense, the sound judgment, and the wit displayed in it fully justify, not only my compliment, but all compliments that either have been already paid to her talents, or shall be paid hereafter. Voltaire, I doubt not, rejoiced that his antagonist wrote in English, and that his countrymen could not possibly be judges of the dispute. Could they have known how much she was in the right, and by how many thousand miles the Bard of Avon is superior to all their dramatists, the French critic would have lost half his fame among them.”

While honour was being showered on the writer of the essay, ill health, from which she suffered long and frequently, marred her triumph.

Writing to Mrs. W. Robinson, from Hill Street, November the 19th, 1770, she says: “... I fell ill on my journey to Denton, or rather, indeed, began the journey indisposed, and only aggravated my complaints by travelling. Sickness and bad weather deprived me of the pleasure of seeing the beauties of Derbyshire. However, I got a sight of the stately Palace of Lord Scarsdale, where the arts of antient Greece and the delicate pomp of modern ages unite to make a most magnificent habitation. It is the best worth seeing of any house, I suppose, in England. But I know how it is that one receives but moderate pleasure in the works of art. There is a littleness in every work of man. The operations of nature are vast and noble, and I found much greater pleasure in the contemplation of Lord Breadalbane’s mountains, rocks, and lakes than in all the efforts of human art at Lord Scarsdale’s.”

Mrs. Montagu’s illness increasing at Denton, she writes: “Doctor Gregory came from Edinburgh to make me a visit, and persuaded me to go back with him. The scheme promised much pleasure, and, I flattered myself, might be conducive to health, as the doctor, of whose medical skill I have the highest opinion, would have time to observe and consider my various complaints. I was glad also to have an opportunity of amusing my friend, Mrs. Chapone, whom I carried into the north with me. We had a pleasant journey to Edinburgh, where we were most agreeably entertained in Doctor Gregory’s house, all the literate and polite company of Edinburgh paying me all kind of attentions; and, by the doctor’s regimen, my health improved greatly; so that I was prevailed upon to enjoy my love of prospects by another trip to the Highlands, my good friend and physician still attending me. The first day’s journey was to Lord Buchan, brother to Mr. Charles Erskine, who was the intimate companion and friendly competitor of my poor brother Tom. Each of them was qualified for the highest honours of their profession, which they would have certainly attained, had it pleased God to have granted longer life. Lord Buchan had received great civilities at Horton when he was pursuing his law studies in England; so he came to visit me as soon as I got to Edinburgh, and, in the most friendly manner, pressed my passing some days at his house in Perthshire. I got there by an easy day’s journey, having also walked a long time about the castle of Stirling, which commands a very beautiful prospect.

“Lord Buchan’s place is very fine and in a very singular style. His house looks to the south, over a very rich valley, rendered more fertile as well as more beautiful by the meanderings of the river Forth. Behind his house rise great hills covered with wood, and over them stupendous rocks. The goats look down with an air of philosophic pride and gravity on folks in the valley. One in particular seemed to me capable of addressing the famous beast of Gavaudan, if he had been there, with as much disdain as Diogenes did the great conqueror of the East. Here I passed two days very agreeably, and then his lordship and my doctor attended me to my old friend Lord Kinnoul’s. You may imagine my visit there gave me a great deal of pleasure besides what arose from seeing a fine place. I was delighted to find an old friend enjoying that heartfelt happiness which attends a life of virtue. Lord Kinnoul is continually employed in encouraging agriculture and manufactures, protecting the weak from injury, assisting the distressed, and animating the young people to whatever in their various stations is most fit and proper.... He appears more happy in this situation than when he was whirled about in the vortex of the Duke of Newcastle. The situation of a Scottish nobleman of fortune is enough to fill the ambition of a reasonable man, for they have power to do a great deal of good.

“From Dupplin we went to Lord Breadalbane’s, at Taymouth. Here unite the sublime and beautiful. The house is situated in a valley where the verdure is the finest imaginable; noble beeches adorn it, and beautiful cascades fall down the midst of it. Through this valley you are led to a vast lake. On one side of the lake there is a fine country; on the other, mountains lift their heads or hide them in the clouds. In some places ranges of rocks look like vast fortifyed cittadels. I passed two days in this fine place, where I was entertained with the greatest politeness and kindest attentions, Lord Breadalbane seeming to take the greatest pleasure in making everything easy, agreeable, and convenient.

“My next excursion was to Lord Kames’; and then I returned to Edinburgh. With Lord Kames and his lady I have had a correspondence ever since I was first in Scotland, so I was there received with cordial friendship. I must do the justice to the Scottish nation to say, they are the most politely hospitable of any people in the world. I had innumerable invitations of which I could not avail myself, having made as long a holiday from my business in Northumberland as I could afford.

“The newspapers will inform you of the death of Mr. George Grenville. I think he is a great loss to the publick; and tho’ in these days of ribbaldry and abuse he was often much calumniated, I believe time will vindicate his character as a publick man: as a private one, he was quite unblemished. I regret the loss to myself. I was always pleased and informed by his conversation. He had read a vast deal, and had an amazing memory. He had been versed in business from his youth; so that he had a very rich fund of conversation, and he was good-natured and very friendly.

“The King’s Speech has a warlike tone. But still we flatter ourselves that the French king’s aversion to war may prevent our being again engaged in one.... Lord Chatham was to have spoken in the House of Lords to-day, if poor Mr. Grenville’s death, which happened at seven this morning, had not hindered his appearing in publick....

“Mr. Montagu did not leave Denton till almost a week after I came away; and he was stop’d at Durham by waters being out; but I had the pleasure of hearing yesterday that he got safe to Darlington, where he was to pass a few days with a famous mathematician, but I expect him in town the end of this week. My nephew, Morris, has got great credit at Eton already.... My doctors order me to forbear writing, but this letter does not show my obedience to them.... The celebrated coterie will go on, in spite of all remonstrances, and there is to be an assembly thrice a week for the subscribers to the opera, so little impression do rumours of wars and apprehensions of the plague make in the fine world....

“I am in your debt for my pretty neice’s dancing-master, which I forgot when I had the pleasure of seeing you. I shall hope to supply her, as opportunity offers, with all the assistance of that sort which her happy genius will make of great use to her; but your constant care will supply many better things than those the artists teach, and I do not doubt of her making an amiable and valuable woman. With the most sincere regard, I am, dear madam, your very affectionate sister, and faithful friend, and humble servt., E. M.... I know you will be very glad to hear I left everything in such order in the north, that I shall not pay my devotions to ye pole-star again for some years.”

No two people had more delight in mutual conversation than Mrs. Montagu and Lord Kames. They were so agreed upon one subject,—the insincerity, ignorance, and meanness of Voltaire, as to make their conversation most lively when it turned upon the Frenchman who defiled the character of the most glorious of Frenchwomen, Joan of Arc,—who heaped abuse upon Shakespeare and on those who defended him,—and who hated and miscalled Lord Kames for having weighed his “Henriade” in the scales of criticism, and for having found it “wanting.” Over this reply of Voltaire to Lord Kames, that judge and philosopher, reading it aloud, laughed himself, and raised irrepressible laughter in the lady who listened to him. The reply is in one of Voltaire’s “Lettres à un Journaliste.” “Permit me to explain to you some whimsical singularities of ‘The Elements of Criticism,’ in three volumes, by Lord Makames (sic), a justice of peace in Scotland. That philosopher has a most profound knowledge of nature and art, and he uses the utmost efforts to make the rest of the world as wise as himself. He begins by proving that we have five senses; and that we are less struck by a gentle impression made on our eyes and ears, by colours and sounds, than by a knock on the head or a kick on the leg. Proceeding from that to the rules of time and space, M. Home concludes with mathematical precision, that time seems long to a lady who is about to be married, and short to a man who is going to be hanged. M. Home applies doctrines equally extraordinary to every department of art. It is a surprising effect of the progress of the human mind, that we should now receive from Scotland rules for our taste in all matters, from an epic poem down to a garden. Knowledge extends daily, and we must not despair of hereafter obtaining performances in poetry and oratory from the Orkney Islands. M. Home always lays down his opinions as a law, and extends his despotic sway far and wide. He is a judge who absorbs all appeals.”

The famous mathematician to whom Mrs. Montagu refers in the above letter was William Emerson, of whom Mr. Montagu is believed to have been the original patron. Mr. Montagu may, in some degree, have helped that poor and eccentric scholar, but the energies of the once idle Yorkshire dreamer were really developed by an injustice. He had married the niece of a clergyman, who basely cheated the bride out of her dowry of £500. Whereupon the proud and angry husband sent back the whole of his wife’s wardrobe, with the message that he would “scorn to be beholden to such a fellow for a rag!” When Mr. Montagu married Elizabeth Robinson, Emerson had just ready for the press the work which gave him a place in the highest rank of mathematicians—his “Doctrine of Fluxions.” The distinction neither affected his eccentricity nor softened his audacity. He was wont to sign his mathematical solutions with a name that might have made Minerva breathless—“Philofluentimechanelgegeomastrolonzo,” and he lived to shock Mrs. Edward Montagu by snapping his fingers at the Royal Society, and damning the fellows and their fellowships!

George Grenville and Burke are among the best samples of the men whom Mrs. Montagu appreciated, and who could thoroughly appreciate Mrs. Montagu. Burke has spoken in the highest terms of both. Of the statesman who, five years before his death, resigned all his offices, Burke said: “With a masculine understanding and a stout and resolute heart, he had an application undissipated and unwearied. He took public business, not as a duty he was to fulfil, but as a pleasure he was to enjoy; and he seemed to have no delight out of the house, except in such things as in some way related to the business that was to be done within it. If he was ambitious, I will say this for him, that his ambition was of a noble and generous strain. It was to raise himself not by the low, pimping politics of a court, but to win his way to power through the laborious gradations of public service, and to secure himself a well-earned rank in Parliament, by a thorough knowledge of its constitution and in perfect practice in all its business.” Mrs. Montagu might justly be proud of the good opinion of a friend who could express such a judgment of another friend like Grenville, for whom she herself entertained the highest esteem.

Mrs. Montagu to Mrs. Robinson. “January 17, 1771. ... I have kept very well all this frost, and what is more strange in a town lady, I have been very discreet. I have improved upon Lady Grace’s plan of doing very soberly. I have been serious, and solemn and retired, and have sat as quietly at my fireside as any antiquated dowager when her quadrille party was gone into the country. But I have said enough upon such an atom, and I will now talk of ye great persons and things of this world. The Duke of Bedford died of a fit of the asthma. He departed singing the 104th Psalm. This shows he had some piety, but I think his grace sang out of tune; so I am not an admirer of his singing.” (Walpole says he “had lost his sight, and almost his speech and limbs.”) “I like a Psalm-singing cobler in death as well as in life. A poor man who has maintained a wife and children by his labour, has kept the ten commandments, has observed the Sabbath, kept the laws of the community, and lived kindly with his neighbours, may sing his own requiem with a comfortable and cheerful assurance. Of him to whom little is given, little shall be required. But the debtor and creditor of a long account is not so easily settled. Wealth, titles, power give a great influence in society. Have the poor been relieved, the weak protected, the industrious been encouraged, virtue countenanced, merit brought forth to view, the profligate discouraged, the commonwealth served equal to its great demands on a Duke of Bedford, the proprietor of a vast estate? I mean not to intimate that he was to dye in despair, for his Judge is merciful, but in his sight no man living shall be justified; so that, unless there is an uncommon merit or innocence of character, I see no reason for this kind of jollity. His grace has left enough to make the duchess’s jointure £6,000 a year. She is to keep up the houses at Bloomsbury and at Wooburn. Her grace, Mr. Palmer, and the Duchess of Marlborough are trustees for the young duke....

“As the late duke was sometimes headstrong, the court will have an advantage in having the duchess to deal with, as Lord Sandwich is her guide in politicks. The duke left Mr. Rigby £5,000, a sum for which he had Mr. Rigby’s bond. He has left a sum of fourscore pound a year to Miss Wrottesley; a year’s wages to servants. I hear not of other legacies. It is believed Lord Suffolk will not accept of any place....

“It is believed we shall have a Peace. The King of Prussia and the Emperor joined to get a peace for the Turks. These potentates design to keep the French in order and to defend Germany. The Emperor wishes to recover Lorraine and Alsace. So it is supposed the French will sit quiet even if the Spaniards should go to war with us. I am not afraid of the Dons, if not assisted by French vivacity. All our family is well, and the père de famille best of all.... Mr. M. is pure well.”

The following letter to Mrs. Robinson, the writer’s sister-in-law, whose father, Mr. Richardson, was a private gentleman of Kensington, contains a reference to the Kensington “ladies’-school” of the writer’s early time, and one to the Chelsea school, where she visited Mrs. William Robinson’s daughter in 1772. These references are valuable illustrations of the female scholastic life of the two periods. “I called on my pretty neice at Chelsea, who I had the pleasure of finding in perfect health, with a little addition of embonpoint extremely becoming. She received me very politely, and her governesses spoke much in her praise. Indeed, she is a very good subject for them, appearing to have much good-humour, docility, and everything I could wish.” The young Sarah Elizabeth’s extremely becoming embonpoint induced her sagacious aunt to look at her stays. “I found fault with her stays,” she writes, “which lift up her shoulders; and they say they had your leave to get others, but I could not understand why they had neglected to do it. I was pleased to find my neice perfectly clean and neat, tho’ I called on ye Saturday, which is usually only the eve of cleanliness. I remember at Mrs. Robartes’, at Kensington, the girls used to be so dirty, sometimes one could not salute them!”

CHAPTER VII.

Mrs. William Robinson, who, with her husband and children, had been so long abroad, had now returned to England, and had visited Mr. and Mrs. Montagu. Late in the year, Mrs. Montagu wrote to her sister-in-law:

“August ye 9th, 1772. ... I am quite ashamed to think how ungrateful I must have appeared to you and my brother for your kind visit and obliging letter, in letting so long a time pass before I returned my thanks. Your visit appeared to us like a pleasant dream, from which we were sorry to awake and find ourselves deserted by such agreable guests. The Duchess of Portland arrived in two or three days after your departure. She made me rather a longer visit than you did, but still a much shorter than I wished it. Her grace submitted with infinite good-humour to all the awkwardnesses of a Tunbridge lodging. We had, happily, that kind of weather which makes pastoral life agreable. I was delighted to find that time had not robbed her grace of her pleasing vivacity, and we laugh’d as heartily as we used to do in our younger days. Her grace gave me as a fairing the most beautiful, rich, and elegant snuff-box I ever saw, for which I could only return her thanks; for I thought it would be putting myself too much upon a par with her, to make a return in kind. If I could get any natural curiosity to add to her collection, it would make me very happy.

“Every day after you left us the place began to fill with company.

“... We have had the finest weather I ever saw for any long continuance. As a farmer, I have some fault to find with it. Our wheat, and barley, and turnips have all suffered by drought. We had not any reason to complain of our hay, but the grass is very much burnt. The dearness of all kinds of provisions have reduced our poor neighbours to a state of wretchedness which I never saw before in England.... My father has been ill, but I believe his complaints were nervous, and partly the effects of hot weather. I wonder how he can endure to live in a brick oven all the summer season.

“... I went the other day to Winchester, and dined with Doctor Warton, and saw the school. The doctor allowed me to ask a play for the boys, which made them very happy, and gave him leisure to pass the time with me. My sweet, lovely Miss Gregory and I set out very early in the morning, so that we got to Winchester before eleven o’clock, and staid there till between six and seven, and were at home in good time.... Miss Gregory and Mrs. Morgan are much your humble servants.... When you have an opportunity to get the nankeen, tea, and handkerchiefs, I can pay what is due for them to your banker. If a blue tafety, or a white of a very fine colour should come in your way and seem a pennyworth, please to add it, or anything you may have offered that is plain.... Cheap, pretty, plain muslin for gowns would not come amiss. But, as smuggling is a dangerous trade, much counterband goods must not travel in the same box. All possible love to my dear nephew and neices, with whom I hope to make a more intimate acquaintance before they have disposed of all their love and friendship.”

August 15, 1772.—Mrs. Montagu to Mrs. Robinson. “... I was very sorry that your races happened so untowardly, that I could not edge in my visit without being complicated in them. I remember the time when the said races would have a very different effect than deterring me from the neighbourhood; but we change to everything and everything changes to us. I cannot say that as one grows older, one grows so much wiser as to despise foolish amusements, but one likes new kinds of follies. I mean we always like some of those things severe and frowning wisdom calls follies.

“I had the pleasure in finding Mr. Montagu in extreme good health, which gave me the higher satisfaction, as I had been alarmed about him some time before.

“I went a few miles out of my road to Sandleford, to fulfill my old promise to Mr. Burke to spend a day or two with him and Mrs. Burke, at Beaconsfield. I was sorry that I could not continue there longer than one whole day, as I was then not so assured that Mr. Montagu was in perfect health. When the talents of a man of genius, the acuteness of a politician, the alert vivacity of a man of business are all employed to make conversation agreable and society pleasant, one passes one’s time very delightfully in such company.