Born 1690.—Died 1762.
THIS lady, 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 her _uncommon
genius_ at 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, shaded
on 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 curiosity were 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 circumstance compelled 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 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, of which 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 fathomless abysses, 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. To show 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 upon
_traneaus_, 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 their desire 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 Turkish _effendi_, 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 our
female _effendi_ in 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 her _naïve_ mode 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 complete picture 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 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 proportion of 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 conceiving _any 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.
Footnote 3: