LADY WORTLEY MONTAGUE.

Born 1690.—Died 1762.

Thislady, whose claims to be ranked among distinguished travellers none, I think, will be disposed to contest, was born in 1690 at Thoresby, in Nottinghamshire. Her maiden name was Mary Pierre-pont,and she was the eldest daughter of Evelyn, Duke of Kingston, and Lady Mary Fielding, daughter of William Earl of Denbigh. Having had the misfortune to lose her mother while yet only four years old, she was thrown at once among the other sex, and thus acquired from her earliest years those masculine tastes and habits which distinguished her during life, and infused into her writings that coarse, unfeminine energy, that cynical contempt of decorum, and bearded license, if I may so express myself, which constitute her literary characteristics, and render her compositions different from those of every other woman. It was not the mere study of Latin, which the virtuous and judicious Fenelon considered highly beneficial to women, and which at all events may be regarded as a circumstance perfectly indifferent, that produced this undesirable effect; but an improper or careless choice of authors, operating upon a temperament peculiarly inflammable and inclining to voluptuousness. She acquired, we are told, the elements of the Greek, Latin, and French languages under the same preceptors as Viscount Newark, her brother; but preceptors who might, perhaps, be safely intrusted with the direction of a boy’s mind are not always adequate to the task of guiding that of a young woman through the perilous mazes of ancient literature. In fact, among her favourite classical authors Ovid seems to have been the chief at a very early period of her life; for among her poems there is one written in imitation of this author at twelve years of age, containing passages which it has not been thought decent to publish. At a later period her studies were directed by Bishop Burnet, who would seem to have recommended to her the Manual of the ungracious and austere Epictetus, a work which, although she laboured through a translation of it, now included among her works, could have possessed but few charms for her ardent, erratic fancy.

During this early part of her career she lived wholly in retirement at Thoresby or at Acton, near London, where she acquired what by a license of speech may be termed the friendship of Mrs. Anne Wortley, the mother of her future husband. With this lady she maintained an epistolary correspondence, from the published portions of which we discover that both the young lady and the matron were exceedingly addicted to flattery, and that at nineteen the former had already begun to entertain those unfavourable notions of her own sex which in a woman are so justly regarded as ominous of evil. “I have never,” says she, “had any great esteem for the generality of the fair sex; and my only consolation for being of that gender has been the assurance it gave me of never being married to any one among them.”

Her friendship with Mrs. Wortley paved the way to an acquaintance with that lady’s son, which, after much negotiation and many quarrels, the causes of which are rather alluded to than explained in the published correspondence, ended in a private marriage, which took place August 12, 1712. Lady Mary now resided chiefly at Wharncliffe Lodge, near Sheffield, where her son Edward was born, while her husband was detained by his parliamentary duties and political connexions in London. It would appear from various circumstances that Mr. Wortley Montague was a quiet, unambitious man, endowed with very moderate abilities; but his philosophic indifference or timid mode of wooing honours by no means answered the views of his wife, who was haunted in an incredible manner by the desire of celebrity, and who, possessing a caustic wit, a vivacious style, and splendid personal attractions, was conscious, that if once fairly launched upon the tide of the great world she could not fail of effecting her purpose. In the letters which emanated from her solitude we discover, amid a world of affected indifference, her extreme passion for exciting admiration.Now literary projects engross her thoughts; and now she aims, by goading her husband up “the steep of fame,” to open herself a wide field for the exhibition of her Circean powers.

In 1714 Mr. Montague was appointed one of the lords of the treasury; upon which Lady Mary quitted her retirement and appeared at court, where her beauty, her wit, and the ingenuous levity of her manners (a commendable quality in those days) commanded universal admiration. Her genius now moved in its proper sphere. Surrounded, flattered, caressed by the most distinguished characters of the age, she tasted of all those gratifications which the peculiarities of her temperament required; and being in the very flower of her age, looked forward with well-founded hopes to numerous years of the same kind of enjoyments. It was at this period that her intimacy with Pope, who was just two years older than herself, commenced; and as her latest biographer with a pardonable partiality observes, both he and Addison “contemplated heruncommon geniusat that time without envy!” From which one might infer that it was literary jealousy, and not the rage of a neglected lover, that afterward rendered Pope the inveterate enemy of Lady Mary.

However this may be, upon Mr. Montague’s being appointed ambassador to the Porte in 1716, our traveller, smitten with the desire of tasting the pleasures of other lands, resolved to desert all her admirers, and visit with her husband the shores of the Hellespont. They commenced their journey in August; and having crossed the channel, proceeded by Helvoetsluys and the Brill to Rotterdam, where she greatly admired the thronged streets, neat pavements, and extreme cleanliness of the place, which at present would scarcely strike a traveller arriving from London as any thing extraordinary. In travelling from Holland, the whole country appeared like a garden, while the roads were well paved, shadedon both sides with rows of trees, and bordered with canals, through which great numbers of boats were perpetually passing and repassing. The eye, moreover, was every minute alighting upon some villa; while numerous towns and villages, all remarkable for their neatness, dotted the plains, and enlivened the mind of the traveller by exciting ideas of plenty and prosperity.

At Cologne, whither she had proceeded by way of the Hague and Nimeguen, she was greatly amused at the Jesuits’ church by the free raillery of a young Jesuit, who, not knowing, or pretending not to know, her rank, allowed himself considerable liberties in his conversation. Our traveller herself fell in love with St. Ursula’s pearl necklaces; and, as the saint was of silver, her profane wishes would fain have converted her into dressing-plate. These were the only relics of all that were shown her for which she had any veneration; but she very shortly afterward learned, that, at least as far as the pearls and other precious stones were concerned, the holy fathers had been very much of her opinion; for, judging that false jewels would satisfy a saint as well as true ones, they sold the real pearls, &c., and supplied their places with imitations. Our lady-traveller, though exceedingly aristocratical in her notions, and possessed of but small respect for mere untitled human beings, was compelled by her natural good sense to remark, what other observers have frequently repeated since her time, the extreme superiority of the free towns of Germany over those under the government of absolute princes. “I cannot help fancying one,” she says, “under the figure of a clean Dutch citizen’s wife, and the other like a poor town lady of pleasure, painted and ribanded out in her headdress, with tarnished silver-laced shoes, a ragged under-petticoat; a miserable mixture of vice and poverty.”

At Ratisbon the principal objects of curiositywere the envoys from various states, who constituted the whole nobility of the place; and having no taste for ordinary amusements, contrived to divert themselves and their wives by keeping up eternal contests respecting precedents and points of etiquette. Next to these the thing most worthy of notice, from its extreme impiety, was a group of the Trinity, in which the Father was represented as a decrepit old man, with a beard descending to his knees, with the Son upon the cross in his arms, while the Holy Ghost, in the form of a dove, hovered over his head.

From Ratisbon she descended the Danube to Vienna, delighted, as the vessel shot with incredible velocity down the stream, by the amazing variety and rapid changes in the scenery, where rich cultivated plains, vineyards, and populous cities alternated rapidly with landscapes of savage magnificence; woods, mountains, precipices, and rocky pinnacles, with castellated ruins perched upon their summits. In Vienna she was disappointed. Its grandeur by no means came up to the ideas which she had formed of it from the descriptions of others. Palaces crowded together in narrow lanes; splendour on one hand, dirt and poverty on the other, and vice everywhere: such, in few words, is the sum of her account of the Austrian capital. The Faubourg, however, was truly magnificent, consisting almost wholly of stately palaces.

Here Pope’s first letter written during her residence abroad reached her. It is marked by every effort which wit could imagine, being gay and amusing; but betrays the fact, which, indeed, he did not wish to conceal, that he was seriously in love, and deeply afflicted at her absence. Conscious, however, of the criminality of his passion, he labours to clothe it with an air of philosophical sentimentality, feigning, but awkwardly and ineffectually, to be merely enamoured of her soul. This circumstancecompelled him to shadow forth his meaning somewhat obscurely and quaintly for a lover, and deprived him of the advantage of conveying his feelings from his own heart to hers through those glowing trains of words which kindle the souls of the absent almost as effectually as the corporeal presence of the persons beloved. The reply of Lady Mary is conceived with consummate skill: pretending to be in doubt whether she ought to understand him to have been in jest or earnest, she nevertheless confesses, that in her present mood of mind she is more inclined towards the latter interpretation; and then, feeling that her footsteps were straying

per ignesSuppositos cineri doloso,

per ignes

Suppositos cineri doloso,

she starts suddenly out of the dangerous track, and plunges into the description of an opera and a German comedy. Here she is perfectly at her ease; and the coarseness of the subject, which she affects to condemn, so evidently delights her, that she describes in the broadest terms an action the most outrageously gross, perhaps, that was ever endured on the stage.

It has often been remarked, that the interest of a book of travels arises not so much from the newness and strangeness of the objects described, as from the peculiar light which is reflected upon them from the mind of the traveller. This fact is strikingly exemplified in the case of Lady Mary, who, though journeying through places often visited, throws so much of energy and vivacity, and frequently of novelty, into her concise yet minute sketches, that we never pause to inquire whether the objects delineated now come before us for the first time or not. Besides, her sex and the advantages she enjoyed brought many peculiarities both of costume and manners within the range of her observation, ofwhich ordinary travellers can know nothing, except from hearsay, or from points of view too distant to admit of accurate observation. Upon her being presented at court she was struck—as who would not?—by the extravagant appearance of the ladies, who stalked about with fabrics of gauze and ribands a yard high upon their heads, and whalebone petticoats, which with pleasant exaggeration she describes as covering whole acres of ground. The reigning empress perfectly enraptured her with her beauty; and her admiration supplies her with so much eloquence, that a complete picture is wrought out. In other respects the court of Vienna was very much like other contemporary courts—that is, overflowing with every variety of moral turpitude, except that the Viennais had not the hypocrisy to pretend to be virtuous.

From this city our traveller made an excursion into Bohemia, the most desert part of Germany, where the characteristics of the villages were filth and poverty, scarcely furnishing clean straw and pure water, and where the inns were so wretched that she preferred travelling all night in the month of November to the idea of encountering the many unsavoury smells which they abounded with. In this country, however, she made but a short stay, but proceeded across the Erz Gebirge mountains into Saxony. This part of the journey was performed by night. The moonlight was sufficiently brilliant to discover the nature of the frightful precipices over which the road lay, and which in many places was so narrow that she could not discover an inch of space between the wheel and the precipice, while the waters of the Elbe rolled along among the rocks at an immeasurable depth below. Mr. Wortley, who possessed none of the restless sensibility or curiosity of his wife, and preferred a comfortable doze to the pleasure of gazing at moonlit crags throwing their giant shadows over fathomlessabysses, or of discussing the chances of their being hurled into some of these gulfs, composed himself to sleep, and left our traveller to her reflections. For some time she resisted all temptation to disturb him; but observing that the postillions had begun to follow his example, while the horses were proceeding at full gallop, she thought it high time to make the whole party sensible of their danger, and by calling out to the drivers, awakened her husband. He was now alarmed at their critical situation, and assured her that he had five times crossed the Alps by different routes, without having ever seen so dangerous a road; but perhaps he had not been awakened by his companions.

Escaping from the terrors of these mountain scenes, she was extremely disposed to be pleased with even roads and the security of cities, and in this mood of mind found Dresden, which is really an agreeable city, wonderfully pleasing. She here picked up a story which, as it is exceedingly illustrative of kingly notions of love, may be worth repeating. The King of Poland (Elector of Saxony) having discovered that the Count de Cozelle had a very beautiful wife, and understanding the taste of his countrywomen, paid the lady a visit, “bringing in one hand a bag of a hundred thousand crowns, and in the other a horse-shoe, which he snapped asunder before her face, leaving her to draw the consequences of such remarkable proofs of strength and liberality.” I know not, adds our fair traveller, which charmed her most, but she consented to leave her husband, and give herself up to him entirely.

From Dresden she proceeded to Leipzig, to Brunswick, to Hanover,—where the ladies, wearing artificial faces, were handsome to the hour of their death,—and thence back again to Vienna. Here she observes that no women were at that period permitted to act upon the stage, though certainly the regulation did not emanate from motives of delicacy. Toshow their sympathy for physical as well as moral deformity, the emperor and empress had two dwarfs as ugly as devils, especially the female, but loaded with diamonds, and privileged to stand at her majesty’s elbow at all public places. All the other princes of Germany exhibited similar proofs of a taste for the ugly, which was so far improved by the King of Denmark that he made his dwarf his prime minister. “I can assign no reason,” says Lady Montague, “for their fondness for these pieces of deformity, but the opinion all the absolute princes have that it is below them to converse with the rest of mankind; and not to be quite alone, they are forced to seek their companions among the refuse of human nature, these creatures being the only part of their court privileged to talk freely with them.”

Though it was now the depth of winter, Mr. Wortley, who apparently was thoroughly tired of the stupid gayeties of Vienna, determined to escape from them, notwithstanding that all the fashionable world, Prince Eugene among the rest, endeavoured to divert him from his purpose by drawing the most frightful picture of Hungary, the country through which their road lay. The life led by Prince Eugene at the modern Sybaris seems to have inspired our traveller with a generous regret, the only one perhaps she ever felt for a stranger, and gave rise in her mind to that sort of mortification which reflections upon the imperfections of human nature are calculated to give birth to.

The ambassador commenced his journey on the 15th of January, 1717; and the snow lying deep upon the ground, their carriages were fixed upontraneaus, which moved over the slippery surface with astonishing rapidity. In two days they arrived at Raab, where the governor and the Bishop of Temeswar, an old man of a noble family, with a flowing white beard hanging down to his girdle, waited upon them with polite attentions and invitations, which theirdesire to continue their journey compelled them to reject. The plains lying between this city and Buda, level as the sea, and of amazing natural fertility, but now through the ravages of war deserted and uncultivated, presented nothing but one unbroken sheet of snow to the eye; nor, excepting its curious hovels, half above and half below the surface of the earth, forming the summer and winter apartments of the inhabitants, did Buda afford any thing worthy of observation. The scene which stretched itself out before them upon leaving Buda was rude, woody, and solitary, but abounding in game of various kinds, which appeared to be the undisturbed lords of the soil. The peasants of Hungary at that period were scanty and poor, dressed in a coat, cap, and boots of sheepskin, and subsisting entirely upon the wild animals afforded by their plains and woods.

On the 26th they crossed the frozen Danube, pushed on through woods infested by wolves, and arrived in the evening at Essek. Three days more brought them to Peterwaradin, whence, having remained there a few days to refresh themselves after their long journey, they departed for Belgrade. On their way to this city they passed over the fields of Carlowitz, the scene of Prince Eugene’s last great victory over the Turks, and beheld scattered around them on all sides the broken fragments of those instruments with which heroes open themselves a path to glory: sculls and carcasses of men, mingled and trodden together with those of the horse and the camel, the noble, patient brutes which are made to participate in their madness.

During their pretty long stay at Belgrade, Lady Mary, whose free and easy disposition admirably adapted her for a traveller, contracted an acquaintance with Achmet Bey, a Turkisheffendi, or literary man, whom she understood to be an accomplished Arabic and Persian scholar, and who, delighted with the novelty of the thing, undertook to initiate ourfemaleeffendiin the mysteries of oriental poetry, judiciously selecting such pieces as treated of love. In conversation with this gentleman she learned with surprise that the Persian Tales, which at that time were in Europe supposed to be forgeries, and consequently of no authority or value, except as novels, were genuine oriental compositions, like the Arabian Nights, and therefore to be regarded as admirable illustrations of manners.

Leaving Belgrade and the agreeable effendi, they proceeded through the woody wilds of Servia, where the scanty peasantry were ground to the earth by oppression, to Nissa, the ancient capital; and passing thence into Bulgaria, our fair traveller was amused at Sophia with one of those little incidents which, from hernaïvemode of describing them, constitute the principal charm of her travels. This was a visit to the baths. Arriving about ten o’clock in the morning, she found the place already crowded with women, and having cast a glance or two at the form and structure of the edifice, which consisted of fine apartments covered with domes, floored with marble, and adorned with a low divan of the same materials, she proceeded into the principal bathing-room, where there were about two hundred ladies, in the state of nature, seated upon cushions or rich carpets, with their slaves standing behind them, equally unencumbered with dress. The behaviour of both mistresses and maids, however, was characterized by equal modesty. But their beauty and the exquisite symmetry of their forms, which, in the opinion of Lady Mary, at least equalled the most perfect creations of Guido or Titian, defied the powers of language, and compelled the astonished observer, in default of accurate expressions, to have recourse to poetical comparisons, and descriptions of the effects produced upon the mind. It is well known that Homer, despairing of presenting his hearers or readers with a completepicture of Helen’s beauty, has recourse to the same artifice, representing the old statesman exclaiming, as she approaches them veiled upon the ramparts,

Oὐ νέμεσις Τρῶας καὶ ἐϋκνήμιδας ἈχαιοὺςTοιῇδ᾽ ἀμφὶ γυναικὶ πολὺν χρόνον ἄλγεα πάσχειν·Aἰνῶς ἀθανάτῃσι θεῇς εἰς ὦπα ἔοικεν.TN

Oὐ νέμεσις Τρῶας καὶ ἐϋκνήμιδας Ἀχαιοὺς

Tοιῇδ᾽ ἀμφὶ γυναικὶ πολὺν χρόνον ἄλγεα πάσχειν·

Aἰνῶς ἀθανάτῃσι θεῇς εἰς ὦπα ἔοικεν.TN

When, to cut the matter short, he tells us at once that she resembled the immortal goddesses in beauty; and our traveller, with equal felicity, observes, that they were as finely proportioned as any goddess, and that most of their skins were “shiningly white, only adorned with their beautiful hair divided into many tresses, hanging on their shoulders, braided either with pearl or riband,perfectly representing the figures of the Graces.” She was here thoroughly convinced, she observes, of the correctness of an old theory of hers, “that if it were the fashion to go naked, the face would be hardly observed”—for, continues she, “I perceived that the ladies of the most delicate skins and finest shapes had the greatest share of my admiration, though their faces were sometimes less beautiful than those of their companions.” The whole scene was highly picturesque. Some of the ladies were engaged in conversation, some were working, some drinking coffee or sherbet, and others, more languid and indolent, were reclining negligently on their cushions, “while their slaves, generally pretty girls of seventeen or eighteen, were employed in braiding their hair in several pretty fancies.”

This spectacle our traveller quitted for the purpose of examining the ruins of Justinian’s church; but after the bath these appeared so remarkably insipid, that, pronouncing them to be a heap of stones, which may be predicated of most ruins, she returned to her apartments, and prepared with regret to accompany her husband over the Balkan into Roumelia. The road throughout a great proportionof this route lay through woods so completely infested by banditti, that no persons but such as could command the attendance of a numerous escort dared venture themselves among them; and, in fact, the janizaries who accompanied ambassadors and all public functionaries exercised towards the peasantry a degree of oppression so intolerable, that, had the whole population resorted to the profession of robbery for a livelihood, it would have by no means been a matter of wonder. On the ambassador’s arrival at a village, his attendant janizaries seized upon all the sheep and poultry within their reach—“lambs just fallen, and geese and turkeys big with egg”—and massacred them all without distinction, while the wretched owners stood aloof, not daring to complain for fear of being beaten. When the pashas travelled through those districts where perhaps the meat and poultry were lean and tough, as in all probability the peasantry treated them, as often as possible, to the grandsires of their flocks and barn doors, the great men, in addition to the provision they devoured, exacted what was expressly denominated “teeth-money,” as a small compensation for their having worn out their teeth in the service of the public. But though Mr. Wortley and Lady Mary seem to have been ambitious of imitating these three-tailed personages in many respects, they would appear throughout their journey to have eaten the poor people’s fowls and mutton gratis.

On arriving at Adrianople, where the sultan was at that time residing with his court, Lady Mary suddenly found herself in a new world, but extremely suited to her taste. Her principal companion was the French ambassadress, an agreeable woman, but extravagantly fond of parade, with whom she went about seeing such sights as the place afforded, which, every object in the city, except her husband, being new, were sufficiently numerous. The sultan,whom she saw for the first time going in solemn procession to the mosque, was a fine, handsome man of about forty, with full black eyes, and an expression of severity in his countenance. This prince, Achmet III., has been said, upon I know not what authority, to have afterward become enamoured of our fair traveller. The report, in all probability, was unfounded; but the reasons which have induced a contemporary biographer[3]to come to this conclusion are particularly various: independently of Turkish prejudices, which, according to his notion of things, would prevent an emperor from conceivingany such idea, it was not at all probable, he imagines, that a person possessing a Fatima with such “celestial charms” (as Lady Mary describes), and so many other angelic creatures, should have thought for a moment of an “English lady.” What prejudices the sagacious author alludes to, it is difficult to discover; it would not be those of religion, as the imperial harem, it is well known, is constantly replenished with Circassians and Georgians, Christians and Mohammedans, indiscriminately. This point, therefore, must remain doubtful. With respect to Fatima, whatever may have been her charms, she could have been no bar to the sultan’s admiration of Lady Mary, being the wife, not of the sultan, but of the kihaya. The other “angelical creatures” whose influence he rates so highly may very possibly have restrained the affections of their master from wandering beyond the walls of the seraglio; nevertheless, stranger things have happened than that a prince in the flower of his age, neglecting the legitimate objects of his attachment, should allow a greater scope to his desires than either religion or the common rules of decorum would warrant. The best reason for rejecting this piece of scandal is, not that Lady Mary was an“English woman,” and therefore, as M. Duparc would insinuate, too ugly to rival the slaves of the sultan, but that there is no good authority for admitting it.

3.M. Duparc, in the “Biographie Universelle.”

Leaving this point undetermined, however, for want of evidence, let us proceed to the costume of the “angelical creatures” of whom we have been speaking. But Lady Montague must here take the pen into her own hand; for, in describing the mysteries of the toilet, she possesses a felicitous, luxuriant eloquence, which it would be vain in any thing out of petticoats to endeavour to rival. “The first part of my dress (she had adopted the Turkish habit) is a pair of drawers, very full, that reach to my shoes, and conceal the legs more modestly than your petticoats. They are of a thin rose-coloured damask, brocaded with silver flowers. My shoes are of white kid leather, embroidered with gold. Over this hangs my smock, of a fine white silk gauze, edged with embroidery. This smock has wide sleeves, hanging half-way down the arm, and is closed at the neck with a diamond button; but the shape and colour of the bosom are very well to be distinguished through it. The antery is a waistcoat, made close to the shape, of white and gold damask, with very long sleeves falling back, and fringed with deep gold fringe, and should have diamond or pearl buttons. My caftan, of the same stuff with my drawers, is a robe exactly fitted to my shape, and reaching to my feet, with very long, straight falling sleeves. Over this is my girdle, of about four fingers broad, which all that can afford it have entirely of diamonds or other precious stones; those who will not be at that expense have it of exquisite embroidery or satin; but it must be fastened before with a clasp of diamonds. The curdee is a loose robe they throw off or put on according to the weather, being of a rich brocade (mine is green and gold), either lined with ermineor sables; the sleeves reach very little below the shoulders. The headdress is composed of a cap, called talpack, which is in winter of fine velvet, embroidered with pearl or diamonds, and in summer of a light shining silver stuff. This is fixed on one side of the head, hanging a little way down, with a gold tassel, and bound on, either with a circle of diamonds (as I have seen several), or a rich embroidered handkerchief. On the other side of the head the hair is laid flat; and here the ladies are at liberty to show their fancies, some putting flowers, others a plume of herons’ feathers, and, in short, what they please; but the most general fashion is a large bouquet of jewels, made like natural flowers; that is, the buds of pearl, the roses of different-coloured rubies, the jessamines of diamonds, the jonquils of topazes, &c., so well set and enamelled, ’tis hard to imagine any thing of that kind so beautiful. The hair hangs at its full length behind, divided into tresses braided with pearl or riband, which is always in great quantity. I never saw in my life so many fine heads of hair. In one lady’s I have counted a hundred and ten of the tresses, all natural.”

Our traveller, whose faith in the virtue of her sex was exceedingly slender, informs us, however, that these beautiful creatures were vehemently addicted to intrigue, which they were enabled to carry on much more securely than our Christian ladies, from their fashion of perpetually going abroad in masquerade, that is, thickly veiled, so that no man could know his own wife in the street. This, with the Jews’ shops, which were so many places of rendezvous, enabled the fair sinners almost invariably to avoid detection; and when discovered, a sack and a horse-pond, when the Bosphorus was not within a convenient distance, terminated the affair in a few minutes. Still the risk was comparatively small, and “you may easily imagine,” says LadyMary—who seems to have thought that women are never virtuous except when kept within the pale of duty by the fear of imminent danger—“you may easily imagine the number of faithful wives very small in a country where they have nothing to fear from a lover’s indiscretion!” Had we met with so profligate an article of faith in the creed of a male traveller, we should have inferred that he had spent the greater part of his life in gambling-houses and their appendages; but since it is a lady—an ambassadress—an illustrious scion of a noble stock, who thus libels the posterity of Eve, we place our finger upon our lips, and keep our inferences to ourselves.

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

During her stay at Adrianople she discovered something better, however, than Turkish illustrations of Homer, for it was here that she first observed the practice of inoculation for the small-pox, which she had the hardihood to try upon her own children, and was the first to introduce it into England. Among the Turks, who, in all probability, were not its inventors, it was termedingrafting, andthe whole economy of the thing, according to the invariable policy of barbarians, was intrusted to the management of old women. Upon the return of the embassy to England, a Mr. Maitland, the ambassador’s physician, endeavoured, under the patronage of Lady Montague, who ardently desired its extension, to introduce the practice in London; and in 1721, the public attention having been strongly directed to the subject, and the curiosity of professional men awakened, an experiment, sanctioned by the College of Physicians, and authorized by government, was made upon five condemned criminals. With four of these the trial perfectly succeeded, and the fifth, a woman, upon whom no effect was produced, afterward confessed that she had had the small-pox while an infant. The merit of this action of Lady Montague can scarcely be overrated, as, by exciting curiosity and inquiry, it seems unquestionably to have led the way to the discovery of vaccination, that great preservative of life and beauty, and produced at the time immense positive good.[4]

4.A writer in the Annual Register for 1762, thus calculates the amount of the benefit conferred on the British public by Lady Montague:—“If one person insevendie of the small-pox in the natural way, and one inthree hundred and twelveby inoculation, as proved at the small-pox hospital, then, as 1,000,000 divided by seven, gives 142,857½, 1,000,000 divided by 312, gives 3,205 46-312. The lives saved in 1,000,000 by inoculation must be 139,652 11-31. In Lord Petre’s family, 18 individuals died of the small-pox in 27 years. The present generation, who have enjoyed all the advantages of inoculation, are adequate judges of the extremely fatal prevalence of the original disease, and of their consequently great obligations to Lady Mary Wortley Montague.”—Sir Richard Steele, in the Plain Dealer, prefers the introduction of this practice to all “those wide endowments and deep foundations of public charity which have made most noise in the world.”

To return, however, to Adrianople: among the most remarkable things which our fair traveller beheld during her residence in the East was Fatima, the wife of the kihaya, or vizier’s lieutenant, a woman “so gloriously beautiful,” to borrow the expression of her panegyrist, that all lovely things appeared todwindle into insignificance in her presence. The passage in which this lady is described, though in a certain point of view it may be liable to objection, is in every other respect the finest portion of Lady Mary’s travels; exhibiting a remarkable power of affording the imagination of the reader glimpses of corporeal beauties which language is never sufficiently rich and vivid to paint exactly, and betraying at the same time so enthusiastic and unreserved an admiration of another woman’s superior perfections, that we with difficulty recognise in these hurried, ingenuous overflowings of natural eloquence, the female Diogenes of 1740. The whole palace of the kihaya appeared at the moment a fairy creation. Two black eunuchs, meeting the traveller at the door, led her into the harem, between two rows of beautiful female slaves, with their profuse and finely-plaited hair hanging almost to their feet, and dressed in fine light damasks, brocaded with silver. She next passed through a magnificent pavilion, adorned with gilded sashes, now all thrown up to admit the air, and opening into a garden, where there grew a number of large trees, with jessamine and honey-suckles twisted round their trunks, and emitting an exquisite perfume. A fountain of scented water was falling at the lower end of the apartment into three or four basins of white marble, at the same time diffusing an agreeable odour and a refreshing coolness through the air. Over the ceiling the pencil had scattered flowers in gilded baskets. But all these things were forgotten on beholding Fatima. When Lady Mary entered she was sitting on a sofa raised three steps above the floor, and leaning on cushions of white embroidered satin. Two young girls, “lovely as angels,” sat at her feet clothed in the richest costume of the East, and sparkling with jewels. They were her daughters. The mother, however, was so transcendently beautiful, that, in the opinion of Lady Mary, neither these girls, norany thing that ever was called lovely, either in England or Germany, were capable of exciting the least admiration near her. There is truth in the old saying, that beauty possesses a power which irresistibly subdues the soul. No one ever looked for the first time upon a beautiful form without experiencing a certain awe, or consciousness of being in the presence of a superior nature, which the pagans imagined people felt when some deity overawed them with its Shekinah. That an acquaintance with the intellectual or moral imperfections which too frequently attend on beauty very quickly dissipates this impression, we all know: but at the outset most persons feel like our traveller, who says, “I was so struck with admiration, that I could not for some time speak to her, being wholly taken up in gazing. That surprising harmony of features! that charming result of the whole! that exact proportion of body! that lovely bloom of complexion unsullied by art! the unutterable enchantment of her smile!—But her eyes!—large and black, with the soft languishment of the blue! every turn of her face discovering some new grace.”

Into the details of her dress, in the description of which Lady Mary employs warm colouring, it is not necessary to enter. Fatima, on her part, very quickly divined the taste and temperament of her guest, and after a little conversation, carried on through the medium of a Greek lady who accompanied the traveller, she made a sign to four of her beautiful slaves to entertain the stranger with music and dancing. Those who have read descriptions of the fandango of the Spanish ladies, the chironomia of antiquity, or the performances of the Hindoo dancing girls, or voluptuousalméof Egypt, will perhaps be able to form a just conception of the dance with which the ladies of the harem amuse themselves and their female visiters. “This dance,” says Lady Montague, “was very different from whatI had seen before. The tunes so soft!—the motions so languishing!—accompanied with pauses and dying eyes! half falling back, and then recovering themselves in so artful a manner.”

Before her departure from Adrianople, she went to visit the mosque of Sultan Selim I., and being in a Turkish dress was admitted without difficulty; though she supposes, no doubt rightly, that the doorkeepers understood well enough whom they had allowed to enter. The walls were inlaid with Japan china in the form of flowers, the marble pavement was covered with rich Persian carpets, and the whole body of the edifice free from those pews, forms, and chairs which encumber our churches, both Protestant and Catholic, and give the latter, during week-days, the appearance of a lumber-room. About two thousand lamps were suspended in various parts of the building, which, when lighted at night, must show off to great advantage the solemn splendour of the architecture.

The road to Constantinople carried them through the richest meadows, which, as it was then the month of May, were clothed with exceeding beauty, and so thickly sprinkled with flowers and aromatic herbs, that the wheels of the carriages, crushing them as they drove along, literally perfumed the air. At Kutchuk Tchekmedje, where they lodged in what had formerly been a monastery of dervishes, Lady Montague requested the owner, a country schoolmaster, to show her his own apartments, and was surprised, says she, to see him point to a tall cypress-tree in the garden, on the top of which was a place for a bed for himself, and a little lower one for his wife and two children, who slept there every night. I was so much diverted with the fancy, I resolved to examine his nest nearer; but, after going up fifty steps, I found I had still fifty to go up, and then I must climb from branch to branch with some hazard of my neck; I thought it, therefore, the best wayto come down again. Navigators in the South Sea have found whole nations who, like this romantic Ottomite, lived perched upon trees, like eagles, descending only when in lack of prey or recreation.

The first objects which struck her on arriving at Constantinople were the cemeteries, which upon the whole seemed to occupy more ground than the city itself. These, however, with their tombs and chapels, have been so frequently described by modern travellers, that it is unnecessary to dwell upon them, curious as they are; though we may remark, in passing, that their fancy of sculpturing a rose on the monuments of unmarried women is a delicate allusion to the purity of the dead. In the month of June they were driven by the heat of the weather to the village of Belgrade, fourteen miles from Constantinople, on the shores of the Black Sea, one of the usual retreats of the European embassies. Here our fair traveller found an earthly representation of the Elysian Fields:

Devenere locos lætos, et amœna viretaFortunatorum nemorum, sedesque beatas.Largior hic campos, æther et lumine vestitPurpureo.

Devenere locos lætos, et amœna vireta

Fortunatorum nemorum, sedesque beatas.

Largior hic campos, æther et lumine vestit

Purpureo.

Their house, the site of which, nothing more remaining, is still visited by European travellers, stood in the middle of a grove chiefly of fruit-trees. The walks, carpeted with short soft grass, were shady and cool; and on all sides a perpetual verdure was maintained by numerous fountains of pure, beautiful water. From the house and various other points views were obtained of the Black Sea, with its picturesque verdant shores, while the fresh breezes which blew continually from that quarter sufficiently tempered the heat of summer. The charms of such scenes inspire gayety even in the oppressed. For here the Greeks, forgetting for a moment the yoke of the Ottomite, assembled in great numbers of bothsexes every evening, to laugh and sing, and “dance away their time.”

From an absurd request which had been made to her by Lady Rich to purchase her a Greek slave, Lady Montague, having observed that the “Greeks weresubjects, notslaves!” takes occasion to describe to her friend the various kinds of female slaves which were to be found in Turkey. And though brief, her account is not particularly incorrect. But she eagerly seizes upon this opportunity to disparage the relations of all former travellers, treating them collectively as a herd of low people, who had never enjoyed the advantage of conversing with barbarians of quality. She was therefore ignorant that Busbequius, Pietro della Valle, Chardin, and others had lived upon most familiar terms with Turks of the highest consideration in the empire; and that, excepting in what relates to the harem, from which their sex excluded them, they might have afforded her ladyship very important instruction upon several particulars of Turkish manners. Upon cosmetics her authority, of course, is paramount. Neither Della Valle nor Chardin ever daubed their faces with balm of Mecca, and consequently could not pretend to speak of its virtues with the same confidence as Lady Mary, who, as she confesses with indignation, was rendered, by the indiscreet application of it, a perfect monster for three days. Having been presented with a small quantity of the best sort, “I with great joy,” says she, “applied it to my face, expecting some wonderful effect to my advantage. The next morning the change indeed was wonderful; my face was swelled to a very extraordinary size, and all over as red as my Lady H——’s. It remained in this lamentable state three days, during which, you may be sure, I passed my time very ill. I believed it would never be otherwise; and to add to my mortification, Mr. Wortley reproached my indiscretion without ceasing. However, my face is sincein statuquo; nay, I am told by the ladies here that it is much mended by the operation, which I confess I cannot perceive in my looking-glass.”

On the 6th of June, 1718, she left Constantinople with regret. And at this I do not wonder, for there was in her character a coarse sensual bent, closely approximating to the oriental cast of mind, which in a wild unpoliced capital, where, according to her own account, women live in a state of perpetual masquerade, might still more easily be yielded to even than in London. Of study and the sciences she had by this time grown tired. She regretted that her youth had been spent in the acquisition of knowledge. The Turks, who consumed their lives “in music, gardens, wine, and delicate eating,” appeared upon the whole much wiser than the English, who tormented their brains with some scheme of politics, I use her own words, or in studying some science to which they could never attain. “Considering what short-lived weak animals men are,” she adds, “is there any study so beneficial as the study ofpresent pleasure?” And lest any one should mistake her after all, she subjoins, “but I allow you to laugh at me for my sensual declaration in saying that I had rather be a richeffendiwith all his ignorance, than Sir Isaac Newton with all his knowledge.” No doubt; and Lais, Cleopatra, or Ninon would have said the same thing.

Sailing down the Dardanelles, they cast anchor between the castles of Sestos and Abydos, where,

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