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 andhusband, 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. Shewas 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 tothose 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 wifewas 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 thebon ton, and we know thebon tonof 1756 isun 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 weredenominated 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 herfriend. 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 manyhours 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.” Withrespect, 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 fewerhours,” 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 “actionsshould be valued by their utility rather than theiréclat,” 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 ofbon 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 thatIci on parle Françaismight be posted upon the banks of the Styx; for, in the dialogue between Plutarch, Charon, and a modern bookseller, the first alludes tofinesse, and the second refers to thefriseurof 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 contemporarysocial 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 atthe 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 gaudygoûtof 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 havecomplied 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 agenius, 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. Montagumaintained 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. Fancymay 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, thegrossièretédisgusts 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 shouldendeavour 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 alsovery 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 MontaguPhotogravure after an original miniature
Lady Mary Wortley MontaguPhotogravure after an original miniature
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.