————In the month of cold December,Leander, daring boy, was wont,—What maid will not the tale remember?—To cross thy stream, broad Hellespont!
————In the month of cold December,Leander, daring boy, was wont,—What maid will not the tale remember?—To cross thy stream, broad Hellespont!
————In the month of cold December,Leander, daring boy, was wont,—What maid will not the tale remember?—To cross thy stream, broad Hellespont!
————In the month of cold December,
Leander, daring boy, was wont,—
What maid will not the tale remember?—
To cross thy stream, broad Hellespont!
Here she enjoyed a full view of Mount Ida,
Where Juno once caressed her amorous Jove,And the world’s master lay subdued by love.
Where Juno once caressed her amorous Jove,And the world’s master lay subdued by love.
Where Juno once caressed her amorous Jove,And the world’s master lay subdued by love.
Where Juno once caressed her amorous Jove,
And the world’s master lay subdued by love.
The quotation is Lady Montague’s. Descending a league farther down the Hellespont, she landed at the promontory of Sigeum, and climbed up to visit the barrow beneath which the heroic bones of Achilles repose. Experiencing no enthusiasm at the sight of these Homeric scenes, she was unquestionably right in not affecting what she did not feel; but who, save herself, could have viewed the plains of Troy, the Simois, and the Scamander without having any other ideas awakened in the mind than such as the adventure of Æschines’s companion and the lewd tale of Lafontaine had implanted there? However, to do her justice, though she gives her favourite ideas the precedence, she afterward observes, “there is some pleasure in seeing the valley where I imagined the famous duel of Menelaus and Paris had been fought, and where the greatest city in the world was situated.” Here, though she is mistaken about the magnitude of the city, there is some sign of the only feeling which ever ought to lead a traveller out of his way to behold such a scene; and she goes on to say, “I spent several hours here in as agreeable cogitations as ever Don Quixote had on Mount Montesinos;” in which cogitations let us be charitable enough to suppose that “the tale of Troy divine” was not forgotten.
From the Hellespont they sailed between the islands of the Archipelago, and passing by Sicily and Malta, where they landed, were driven by a storm into Porta Farina, on the coast of Africa, near Tunis, where they remained at the house of the British consul for some days. Being so near the ruins of Carthage, her curiosity to behold so remarkable a spot was not to be resisted; and accordingly she proceeded to the scene, through groves of date, olive, and fig-trees; but the most extraordinary objects she met with were the women of the country, who were so frightfully ugly that her delicate imagination immediately suggested to her theprobability of some intermarriages having formerly taken place between their ancestors and the baboons of the country.
From Tunis they in a few days set sail for Genoa; whence after a little repose they proceeded across the Alps, and through France, to England, where they arrived on the 20th of October, 1718.
Shortly after her return she was induced by the solicitations of Pope, whom two years of reflection had not cured, to take up her residence at Twickenham. But the poet must very soon have discovered that, in comparison with the “richeffendis” and “three-tailed” pashas of the East, his poor little, ailing person, in spite of his grotto and his muse, had dwindled to nothing in the estimation of Lady Mary. Lord Hervey, who, though he wrote verses, had not been “blasted with poetic fire,” was considered, for reasons not given, more worthy of her ladyship’s friendship. However, these changes were not immediately apparent, and other affairs, which came still more home to her bosom than friendship, in the interim occupied her attention; among the rest the idea of realizing immense sums by embarking in the South Sea scheme. She likewise allowed the poet, whom the original had captivated so long, to employ the pencil of Sir Godfrey Kneller in copying her mature charms to adorn his hermitage. She was drawn in the meretricious taste of the times: and the physiognomy of the portrait answers exactly in expression to the idea which we form of Lady Mary from her writings; that is, it exhibits a mixture of intellectuality and voluptuousness, of calm, confident, commanding complacency, bordering a little on defiance or scorn. Pope received the finished picture with the delight of a lover, and immediately expressed his conception of it in the following lines:—
The playful smiles around the dimpled mouth,That happy air of majesty and truth,So would I draw (but oh! ’tis vain to try,My narrow genius does the power deny),The equal lustre of the heavenly mind,Where every grace with every virtue’s joined,Learning not vain, and wisdom not severe,With greatness easy, and with wit sincere,With just description show the soul divine,And the whole princess in my work should shine.
The playful smiles around the dimpled mouth,That happy air of majesty and truth,So would I draw (but oh! ’tis vain to try,My narrow genius does the power deny),The equal lustre of the heavenly mind,Where every grace with every virtue’s joined,Learning not vain, and wisdom not severe,With greatness easy, and with wit sincere,With just description show the soul divine,And the whole princess in my work should shine.
The playful smiles around the dimpled mouth,That happy air of majesty and truth,So would I draw (but oh! ’tis vain to try,My narrow genius does the power deny),The equal lustre of the heavenly mind,Where every grace with every virtue’s joined,Learning not vain, and wisdom not severe,With greatness easy, and with wit sincere,With just description show the soul divine,And the whole princess in my work should shine.
The playful smiles around the dimpled mouth,
That happy air of majesty and truth,
So would I draw (but oh! ’tis vain to try,
My narrow genius does the power deny),
The equal lustre of the heavenly mind,
Where every grace with every virtue’s joined,
Learning not vain, and wisdom not severe,
With greatness easy, and with wit sincere,
With just description show the soul divine,
And the whole princess in my work should shine.
The verses are insipid enough, like most compliments; but they express an opinion which circumstances very shortly afterward compelled him to change, when the princess became transformed into a modern “Sappho” and, thrown with Lord Fanny, Sporus, Atossa, and many others, into a group, was “damned” by satire to “everlasting fame.”
Lady Montague’s life, many years after her return from the East, was spent like that of most other ladies of fashion, who mingle a taste for literature and politics with gallantry. Her letters to her sister, who now, through the attainder and exile of her husband, Erskine Earl of Mar, resided abroad, abound with evidences that the pleasures which she had heretofore regarded as thesummum bonumsoon palled the appetite; and that as the effervescence of animal spirits which, during her youth, had given a keen relish to life subsided, a metamorphosis, the reverse of that of the butterfly, took place, changing the gay fluttering summer insect into a grub. A cynical contempt of all things human succeeded. Into the grounds of her separation from her husband I shall not inquire. Ill health was at the time the cause assigned. The triumph of the political party to which she was opposed has since been absurdly put forward to account for it: but she had, no doubt, other reasons, much more powerful, for cutting herself off, during a period of twenty-two years, from all personal intercourse with her family.
Be this however as it may, in the month of July, 1739, she departed from England, and bade an eternal adieu to Mr. Montague and the greater numberof her old friends. Her first place of residence on the Continent was Venice, from whence she made an excursion to Rome and Naples, and, returning to Brescia, took up her abode in one of the palaces of that city. She likewise visited the south of France and Switzerland. The summer months she usually spent at Louverre, on the lake of Isis, in the territories of Venice, where gardening, silk-worms, and books appear to have afforded her considerable amusement. In 1758 she removed to Venice, and, her husband dying in 1761, she was prevailed upon by her daughter, the Countess of Bute, to return to England. However, she survived Mr. Montague but a single year; for, whether the sudden transition to a northern climate was too violent a shock for her frame, or that a gradual decay had been going on, and was now naturally approaching its termination, she breathed her last on the 21st of August, 1762, in the seventy-third year of her age.
Her letters have been compared with those of Madame de Sevigné, but they do not at all resemble them. The latter have a calm, quiet interest, a sweetness, an ingenuous tenderness, a natural simplicity, which powerfully recommend them to us in those moments when we ourselves are calm or melancholy. Lady Montague’s have infinitely more nerve and vigour, excite a far deeper interest, but of an equivocal and painful cast, and while, in a certain sense, they amuse and gratify, inspire aversion for their writer. On the other hand, Madame de Sevigné is a person whom one would like to have known. She is garrulous, she frequently repeats herself; but it is maternal love which causes the error. In one word, we admire the talents of Lady Montague, but we love the character of Madame de Sevigné.