In October, Mrs. Montagu was in her town house, in Hill Street, receiving
company. Guests of the present day will read, perhaps with a smile of
wonder, the following illustration of the times: “The Duke and Duchess of
Portland and Lord Titchfield dined with me to-day, and stayed till eight
o’clock.”
In the year 1752, there was a subpreceptor to the Prince of Wales, named
George Lewis Scott. His baptismal names were those of the King George
I., at whose court in Hanover Scott’s father had held some respectable
office. The son was recommended for the preceptorship by Bolingbroke to
Bathurst, who spoke in the candidate’s favour to the prince’s mother, and
the king’s sanction followed. Walpole describes Scott as well-meaning,
but inefficient, through undue interference, and as a man of no “orthodox
odour, as might be expected of a protégé of Bolingbroke.” Mr. Scott had
literary tastes, and occasionally exercised them with credit. Such a man
seemed a fitting wooer for Sarah Robinson, Mrs. Montagu’s clever sister.
The wooing sped, marriage followed, and separation, from incompatibility
of temper, came swiftly on the heels of it. The correspondence throws
no light on a dark episode; but in April, 1752, Mrs. Delany wrote to
Mrs. Dewes, in reference to Mrs. Scott’s marriage and the separation
of herself and husband, the following words: “What a foolish match
Mrs. Scott has made for herself. Mrs. Montagu wrote Mrs. Donellan word
that she and the rest of her friends had rescued her out of the hands
of a very bad man; but, for reasons of interest, they should conceal
his misbehaviour as much as possible, but entreated Mrs. Donellan would
vindicate her sister’s character whenever she heard it attacked, for she
was very innocent.” Perhaps it was the misery that came of this marriage
that made Mrs. Montagu conclude a letter from Heys to her husband,
during this year, with these words: “Adieu, my dearest, may you find
amusement everywhere, but the most perfect happiness with her who is by
every grateful and tender sentiment your most affectionate and faithful
wife, E. M.” The writer herself could find amusement everywhere. A
country-house, well-furnished with books, made Sandleford more agreeable
to her than the glories within and the dust without her house in Hill
Street. She speaks deliciously of having her writing-table beneath
the shade of the Sandleford elms, and she thus pleasantly contrasts
country-house employments with the pleasures of reading ancient history,
which lightened the burthen of those employments: “To go from the toilet
to the senate-house; from the head of a table to the head of an army;
or, after making tea for a country justice, to attend the exploits,
counsels, and harangues of a Roman consul, gives all the variety the
busy find in the bustle of the world, and variety and change (except
in a garden) make the happiness of our lives.” She read Hooke’s “Roman
History” as an agreeable variety. Her mind was stronger than her body.
She was now only thirty-two years of age; and she writes to Gilbert
West, that ex-lieutenant of horse, and honest inquirer into theological
questions: “You will imagine I am in extraordinary health, when I talk
of walking two miles in a morning.” If she could not walk far, she could
read and stand anything. In December, she was again at home in Hill
Street. On Christmas Eve, 1752, she writes: “I proposed answering my dear
Mrs. Boscawen’s letter yesterday, but the Chinese-room was filled by a
succession of people from eleven in the morning till eleven at night.”
Early in January, 1753, close upon the anniversary of the death of the
brother whom she dearly loved,—her brother “Tom,”—who died a bachelor,
in 1748, an event occurred, the bearing of which is only partially told
in a letter from Mrs. Montagu to Gilbert West: “My mind was so shocked
at my arrival here, that for some days I was insupportably low. I am now
better able to attend to the voice of reason and duty. A friendship,
begun in infancy, and reunited by our common loss and misfortune, had
many tender ties. By tender care I had raised her from despair almost
to tranquillity. I had hourly the greatest of pleasures, that of
obliging a most grateful person. She made every employment undertaken
for me, and every expression of my satisfaction in her execution of
those employments, a pleasure. I received from her kind offices, which,
however considerable, fell short of the zeal that prompted them. Of this,
I do not know that there is a pattern left in the world. She was much
endeared, and her loss embittered to me by another consideration, which
you may reasonably blame, as it shows too fond an attachment to those
things which we ought to resign to the Great Giver; but while she was
under my care, I thought a kind of intercourse subsisted between me and a
most dear and valuable friend whom I lost this time five years. Whatever
I did for her I thought done for that friend on whom my affections,
hopes, and pride were placed.”
This little romance having come to a sad conclusion, Mrs. Montagu was
soon afterward in town, running, as she said, “from house to house,
getting the cold scraps of visiting conversation, served up with the
indelicacy and indifference of an ordinary, at which no power of the mind
does the honours; the particular taste of each guest is not consulted,
the solid part of the entertainment is too gross for a delicate taste,
and the lighter fare insipid. Indeed, I do not love fine ladies, but I
am to dine with ... to-morrow, notwithstanding.” Again, in November,
1754, she writes from Hill Street, the day after her arrival: “In my town
character, I made fifteen visits last night. I should not so suddenly
have assumed my great hoop, if I had not desired to pay the earliest
respects to Lady Hester Pitt, who is something far beyond a merely fine
lady.”
Mrs. Montagu did not seek for friends exclusively among the great. With
her and with Lyttelton, intellect was the chief attraction. They both
received into their friendship the refugee Bower, who made so much noise
in his day. Mrs. Montagu and Lyttelton refused to abandon him when he
was assailed by his enemies. When she was told, in a letter from a Roman
Catholic, that Bower, the ex-Jesuit whom she had received in her house,
was a knave, that his wife was a hussy, and that Mrs. Montagu herself
was an obstinate idoliser and a perverse baby for believing in them, she
continued her trust, despised report, and asked for facts.
In 1755, Mrs. Montagu affected to detect the first sign of her
superannuation in her sudden resolution not to go to Lady Townshend’s
ball, though a new pink silver negligée lay ready for the donning. Once,
she said, her dear friend, Vanity, could lure her over the Alps or the
ocean to a ball like Lady Townshend’s. The day was past since she would
have gone eight miles, in winter, to dance to a fiddle, and would have
squalled with joy at being upset on her way home. She and Vanity, she
thought, had now parted. “I really believe she has left me as lovers do
their mistresses, because I was too fond, denied her nothing, and was
too compliant to give a piquancy to our commerce.” She was as “sharp” in
judging others as herself. Of Lady Essex (the daughter of Sir Charles
Hanbury Williams, who married the Earl of Essex in 1754, and died in
1759), Mrs. Montagu, in the intervening year, 1756, says: “Lady Essex
coquettes extremely with her own husband, which is very lawful.... She
wants to have the _bon ton_, and we know the _bon ton_ of 1756 is _un peu
equivoque_.”
And now, in the year 1757, the celebrated word “bluestockings” first
occurs in Mrs. Montagu’s correspondence. Boswell, under the date 1781,
tells us in his “Life of Johnson,” that “about this time, it was much
the fashion for several ladies to have evening assemblies, where the
fair sex might participate in conversation with literary and ingenious
men, animated by a desire to please. These societies were denominated
Blue Stocking Clubs. One of the most eminent members of these societies,
when they first commenced, was Mr. Benjamin Stillingfleet, whose dress
was remarkably grave, and, in particular, it was observed that he wore
blue stockings. Such was the excellence of his conversation, that his
absence was felt as so great a loss that it used to be said, ‘We can do
nothing without the blue stockings,’ and thus, by degrees, the title
was established.” Boswell was greatly mistaken, for, in 1781, Benjamin
Stillingfleet, the highly accomplished gentleman, philosopher, and
barrack-master of Kensington, had been dead ten years, and he had left
off wearing blue stockings at least fourteen years before he died.
This subject will be referred to in a subsequent page. Meanwhile, in
March, 1757, when rumours of war were afloat, Mrs. Montagu gaily wrote
to her husband; “If we were in as great danger of being conquered by
the Spaniards as by the French, I should not be very anxious about my
continuance in the world; but the French are polite to the ladies, and
they admire ladies a little in years, so that I expect to be treated
with great politeness, and as all laws are suspended during violence, I
suppose that you and the rest of the married men will not take anything
amiss that happens on the occasion: nor, indeed, should it be a much
greater fault than keeping a monkey if one should live with a French
marquis for a quarter of a year!” A little later, Walpole told George
Montagu a story which illustrates the scandal-power of the period. “I was
diverted,” he wrote, “with the story of a lady of your name and a lord
whose initial is no further from hers than he himself is supposed to be.
Her postilion, a lad of fifteen, said, ‘I’m not such a child but I can
guess something! Whenever my Lord Lyttelton comes to my lady, she orders
the porter to let in nobody else, and then they call for pen and ink,
and say they are going to write history!’ I am persuaded, now that he is
parted, that he will forget he is married, and propose himself in form to
some woman or other!”
Such scandal as this could not affect either of the parties against whom
it was pointed. In the next following years of the reign of George the
Second, Mrs. Montagu led her usual life. In London, gay; in the country,
busy and thoughtful. “In London,” she asks, “who can think? Perhaps,
indeed, they may who are lulled by soft zephyrs through the broken
pane, but it cannot happen to ladies in Chinese-rooms!” In those rooms
she received all, native and foreign, whose brains or other desirable
possessions entitled them to a welcome. At Sandleford, she was sometimes
reading a translation of Sophocles, dear to her almost as Shakespeare
himself, but as often she was amid accounts relative to firkins of
butter, tubs of soap, and chaldrons of coal. When she left the country,
it was in the odour of civility; for Mr. and Mrs. Montagu invited a
cargo of good folks to dinner, and, like Sir Peter Teazle, left their
characters among them to be discussed till the next season. In 1758, Mrs.
Montagu became acquainted with Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, the translator of
Epictetus; and Mr. Montagu, by the death of a relative, succeeded to
the inheritance of rich possessions in the north. Mrs. Montagu thought
she had got the richer estate, in the learned lady who had become her
friend. Nevertheless, she bore the accession of fortune with hilarious
philosophy. “As the gentleman from whom Mr. Montagu inherits had been mad
about forty years, and almost bedridden for the last ten, I had always
designed to be rather pleased and happy when he resigned his unhappy
being and his good estate.” She only fancied there was neither pleasure
nor happiness in it, because the “business” appertaining to succession
was wearisome.
When she found herself among the great coal-owners, she was neither
happy nor pleased. They could only talk of coal, and of those who had
been made or ruined by it. “As my mind is not naturally set to this
tune,” she wrote to Mr. Benjamin Stillingfleet, “I should often be glad
to change it for a song from one of your Welsh bards.” She, however,
intended to turn the occasion to intellectual profit by exploring the
country, and studying its beauties and natural productions, but a little
fainting fit put an end to this design. An overzealous maid went to her
aid, when fainting, with a bottle of eau-de-luce, but as she emptied the
contents into Mrs. Montagu’s throat, instead of applying it outwardly
for refreshment, the lady was nigh upon being then and there deprived
of upwards of forty years of life. She happily recovered, and by and by
she speaks of herself, in London, as “going wherever two or three fools
were gathered together, to assemblies, visiting-days etc. Twenty-four
idle hours, without a leisure one among them!” So she said; but an order
to Mrs. Denoyer, at the Golden Bible, Lisle Street, for a hundred of
the best pens and half a ream of the finest and thinnest quarto paper,
indicates how many hours of the twenty-four were employed. She thought,
or she affected to think, that she grew idler as she grew older. In one
of her letters to old Doctor Monsey,—a grotesque savage and scholar,
who, in lugubrious jokery, wrote love-letters (which she pretended to
take seriously) at fourscore,—she said, in September, 1757, just before
her thirty-seventh birthday: “I shall write to you again when I am
thirty-seven; but I am now engaged in a sort of death-bed repentance for
the idleness of the thirty-sixth year of my age!” She certainly took a
wrong view of her case when she further said: “Having spent the first
part of my life in female vanities, the rest in domestic employments,
I seem as if I had been measuring ribbons in a milliner’s, or counting
pennyworths of figs and weighing sugar-candy in a grocer’s shop all my
life.” This was no affectation. “If you envy me,” she added, “or know any
one who does, pray tell them this sad truth. Nothing can be more sad.
Nothing can be more true.”
It would have been sad, if it had been true; but she was severe in her
own censure. If she cheerfully plunged into the vortex of fashionable
duties, she persistently proclaimed her higher enjoyment of home
privileges. She sneered at her own presence wherever two or three
fools were gathered together, but her honest ambition was to establish
friendships with the wise and the virtuous. Johnson assured her of her
“goodness so conspicuous,” and was proud of being asked to use his
influence to obtain her support of poor Mrs. Ogle’s benefit concert,
as it gratified his vanity that he should be “supposed to be of any
importance to Mrs. Montagu.” With respect, at this time, for Johnson,
she had a deeper feeling of regard for Burke. “Mr. Burke, a friend of
mine.” There is reasonable pride in the assertion, and how tenderly and
cleverly she paints her “friend!”—“He is, in conversation and writing,
an ingenious and ingenuous man, modest and delicate, and on great and
serious subjects full of that respect and veneration which a good mind,
and a great one, is sure to feel; he is as good and worthy as he is
ingenious.” Her love of books was like her love of friends. Dressed for
a ball, she sat down, read through the “Ajax” and the “Philoctetes” of
Sophocles, wrote a long critical letter on the two dramas, and, losing
her ball, earned her bed and the deep sleep she enjoyed in it. At
Tunbridge, she describes the occupation of a single morning as consisting
of going to chapel, then to a philosophical lecture, next to hear a
gentleman play the viol d’amore, and finally to hold controversy with a
Jew and a Quaker. In 1760, she was equally vivacious, in “sad Newcastle.”
In September of that year, she writes to Lord Lyttelton, that she was
taking up her freedom, by entering into all the diversions of the place.
“I was at a musical entertainment yesterday morning, at a concert last
night, at a musical entertainment this morning; I have bespoken a play
for to-morrow night, and shall go to a ball, on choosing a mayor, on
Monday night.” But in the hours of leisure, between these dissipations,
she fulfilled all her duties as a woman of business in connection with
her steward’s accounts and the coal interests, and devoted the remainder
to the study of works in the loftiest walks of literature. “More leisure
and fewer hours,” she says, “had possibly made me happier, but my
business is to make the best of things as they are.” She ever made the
best of two old and wise men who professed, in mirth, to make love to
her in all seriousness. The two wise men look, in their correspondence,
like two fools. Lord Bath, the wiser of the two, looks more of a fool
than Doctor Monsey, and there is something nauseous in the affected
playfulness of the aged lovers, and also in the equally affected virginal
coyness with which Mrs. Montagu received, encouraged, or put aside their
rather audacious gallantry. Her part in these pseudo love-passages was
born of her charity. It gave the two old friends pleasure (Lord Lyttelton
himself styled her Ma Donna), and it did no harm to the good-natured
lady. Lord Bath, however, is not to be compared with such a buffoon as
Monsey. His honest opinion of Mrs. Montagu was, that there never was and
never would be a more perfect being created than that lady. And Burke
said that the praise was not too highly piled.
It was at this period that Mrs. Montagu first appeared as an authoress,
but anonymously. Of the “Dialogues of the Dead,” published under Lord
Lyttelton’s name, she supplied three. They are creditable to her, and are
not inferior to those by my lord, which have been sharply criticised,
under the name of “Dead Dialogues,” by Walpole. In “Cadmus and Mercury,”
the lady shows that strength of mind, properly applied, is better than
strength of body. There is great display of learning; Hercules, however,
talks like gentle Gilbert West; and Cadmus, when he says that “actions
should be valued by their utility rather than their _éclat_,” shows a
knowledge of French which was hardly to be expected in him.
If we are surprised at the cleverness of Cadmus, in speaking French, we
cannot but wonder at the ignorance of Mercury, in the next dialogue, with
a modern fine lady, in not knowing the meaning of _bon ton_. But the
lady’s description of it is as good as anything in the comedy of the day.
As for the manners of the period, as far as they regard husbands, wives,
and children, their shortcomings are described with a hand that is highly
effective, if not quite masterly.
Mrs. Montagu seems to think that _Ici on parle Français_ might be posted
upon the banks of the Styx; for, in the dialogue between Plutarch,
Charon, and a modern bookseller, the first alludes to _finesse_, and
the second refers to the _friseur_ of Tisiphone. But Plutarch had met
M. Scuderi in the Shades! On the other hand, he had never heard of
Richardson or Fielding! Nevertheless, the criticisms on modern fiction
and modern vices are, if not ringing with wit, full of good sense and
fine satire. They could only have come from one who had not merely read
much, but who had thought more: one who had not only studied the life
and society of which she was a part, but who could put a finger on the
disease and also point out the remedy.
The first and last dialogues are enriched by remarks which are the result
of very extensive reading. That between Mercury and the modern fine
lady abounds in proofs of the writer’s observation, and consequently of
illustrations of contemporary social life. The lady pleads her many
engagements, in bar to the summons of Mercury to cross the Styx. These
are not engagements to husband and children, but to the play on Mondays,
balls on Tuesdays, the opera on Saturdays, and to card assemblies the
rest of the week, for two months to come. She had indeed found pleasure
weary her when the novelty had worn off; but “my friends,” she says,
“always told me diversions were necessary, and my doctor assured me
dissipation was good for my spirits. My husband insisted that it was
not; and you know that one loves to oblige one’s friends, comply
with one’s doctor, and contradict one’s husband.” She will, however,
willingly accompany Mercury, if he will only wait for her till the end
of the season. “Perhaps the Elysian fields may be less detestable than
the country in our world. Pray have you a fine Vauxhall and Ranelagh?
I think I should not dislike drinking the Lethe waters when you have
a full season.” This fine lady has not been destitute of good works.
“As to the education of my daughters, I spared no expense. They had
a dancing-master, a music-master, and a drawing-master, and a French
governess to teach them behaviour and the French language.” No wonder
that Mercury sneered at the fact that the religion, sentiment, and
manners of those young ladies were to be learnt “from a dancing-master,
music-master, and a chambermaid.” As to the last, there soon came in
less likely teachers of French to young ladies than French chambermaids.
General Burgoyne makes his Miss Allscrip (in “The Heiress,” a comedy
first played in 1786) remark: “We have young ladies, you know, Blandish,
boarded and educated, upon blue boards in gold letters, in every village;
with a strolling player for a dancing-master, and a deserter from Dunkirk
to teach the French grammar.”
The dialogues had a great success. The three avowedly “by another hand”
interested the public, as the circumstance gave them a riddle to be
solved in their leisure hours. They were attributed to men of such fine
intellect that Mrs. Montagu had every reason to be delighted at such an
indirect compliment.
If her own account is to be taken literally, she had now, at forty,
assumed gravity as a grace and an adornment. In 1761, she wrote to Mrs.
Elizabeth Carter that, whether in London or in the country, “I am become
one of the most reasonable, quiet, good kind of country gentlewoman that
ever was.” And she closes another letter to the same lady, in September
of the same year, with the observation,—made when she was only forty-one,
and had but just accomplished half of a career of which she was already
tired,—“I will own I often feel myself so weary of my journey through
this world, as to wish for more rest, a quiet Sabbath after my working
days; but when such time shall come, perhaps some painful infirmity may
find my virtue employment; but all this I leave to Him who knows what is
best.”
While the writer was recording this wish and making this reflection, all
England was in a frenzy of exultation at the accession of the young king,
George III., and all London in feverish excitement at the coming of a
young queen. When, so to speak, the uproar of festival and congratulation
culminated at the coronation of the young royal couple, the lady who
was weary of life and sighed for a Sabboth of rest, got into a coach
at Fulham at half-past four on an October morning, and was driven to
Lambeth. With her gay company she was rowed across the river from Lambeth
to the cofferer’s office, whence she saw the procession go and return,
between Westminster Hall and the Abbey, and owned that it exceeded her
expectations. The return to the Hall was made, however, in the dark; and,
under shadow of night, the Montagu party were rowed to York Buildings,
where a carriage waited to take them to Fulham. The lady, stirred by a
new sensation, which was followed by neither fatigue nor indisposition,
seemed to have resumed the spirit of the nymph who used to take headers
into the Mary-le-bone Gardens plunging-bath, and to be complimented, on
her daring, in ballads, by Lord Dupplin!
* * * * *
When the fashionable world flocked to Mrs. Montagu’s house in Hill
Street, in the middle of last century, the street was not paved, and the
road was very much at the mercy of the weather. To get to the house was
not always an easy matter. When entered, the visitor found it furnished
in a style of which much was said, and at which the hostess herself
laughed. “Sick of Grecian elegance and symmetry, or Gothick grandeur
and magnificence, we must all seek the barbarious gaudy _goût_ of the
Chinese; and fat-headed pagods and shaking mandarins bear the prize from
the finest works of antiquity; and Apollo and Venus must give way to a
fat idol with a sconce on his head. You will wonder I should condemn the
taste I have complied with, but in trifles I shall always conform to the
fashion.”
There were duties connected with her position which Mrs. Montagu as
scrupulously fulfilled. Receiving and returning visits was “a great
devoir.” Resort to assemblies was a “necessary thing;” the duty of seeing
and being seen was an indispensable duty; but she had mental resources
which enabled her to pity the “polite world,” which had no way of driving
away ennui but by pleasure. If in Hill Street she was of “the quality,”
as Chesterfield called them, in the country she was not only what she
loved to call herself, a farmer’s wife, but a political economist. At
Sandleford we see a poor wretch standing at the door of the mansion. She
is hideous from dirt, poverty, and contagious disease born of both. The
lady farmer was not only charitable but something besides. “I was very
angry with her,” she says, “that she has lately introduced another heir
to wretchedness and want. She has not half Hamlet’s delicacies on the
question. To be or not to be! The law’s delays are very puny evils to
those her offspring must endure. The world affords no law to make her
rich, and yet she will increase and multiply over the face of the earth.”
Throughout the printed letters, continual examples occur of Mrs.
Montagu’s acute observation of character, and of her happy expression
when she described it. She not only watched closely, but spoke boldly of
the ladies around her, and of their more or less pretty ways. Thus, Mrs.
Montagu saw that all the ladies courted Doctor Young, the poet, but she
was sure it was only because they had heard he was a genius, and not
that they knew he was one. When some misses expressed their delight at a
particular ball, she remarked that their delight was probably increased
by the absence of Miss Bladen, who became Lord Essex’s second countess,
and who was not there to outshine them! “So strong in women,” she said,
“was the desire of pleasing, each would have that happy power confined
to her own person.” It did not escape her eye that Lady Abercorn and
Lady Townshend, “each determining to have the most wit of any person in
the company, always chose different parties and different ends of the
room.” How gracefully serene is the portrait of the Duchess of Somerset,
who did what was civil without intending to be gracious, and who so
surprised Mrs. Montagu, in 1749, because the princely state and pride
the duchess had so long been used to, had “left her such an easiness
of manners.” One of her exceptional touches was when she described the
pious Countess of Huntingdon as a “well-meaning fanatic.” That must have
been after Gilbert West and Lord Lyttelton had brought her out of the
field of Free Inquirers, and the Primate of Ireland had made her of the
religion of the Established Church. At that period she would have placed
the church above the law, resembling the old Scottish woman of the kirk,
who, on pronouncing that to take a walk on the Sabbath was a deadly sin,
was reminded that Jesus himself had walked in the corn-fields on the
Sabbath-day, to which she replied, “Ah weel, it is as ye say; but I think
none the better o’ him for it!”
Adverting to a wicked saying, that few women have the virtues of an
honest man, Mrs. Montagu maintained that a little of the blame thereof
falls on the men, “who are more easily deluded than persuaded into
compliance. This makes the women have recourse to artifice to gain
power, which, as they have gained by the weakness or caprice of those
they govern, they are afraid to lose by the same kind of arts addressed
to the same kind of qualities; and the flattery bestowed by the men on
all the fair from fifteen, makes them so greedy of praise that they most
excessively hate, detest, and revile every quality in another woman
which they think can obtain it.” This is the censure, or judgment, be it
remembered, on Last Century Ladies!
When Mrs. Fielding, to benefit those ladies, wrote a novel called “The
Penitents,” supposed to be the history of the unhappy fair ones in the
Magdalen House, Mrs. Montagu remarked, hesitatingly, “As all the girls in
England are reading novels, it may be useful to put them on their guard;”
but she adds, decisively, “If I had a daughter, I should rather trust her
to ignorance and innocence than to the effect of these cautions!”
Of course, Mrs. Montagu studied the gentlemen as profoundly as the
ladies. As one result, she gently laughed at Doctor Young’s philosophy,
which brought him to believe that one vice corrects another, till an
animal made up of ten thousand bad qualities grows to be a social
creature tolerable to live with. Sir William Brown could hardly claim
this toleration, for he had not discovered (said Mrs. Montagu) that the
wisest man in the company is not always the most welcome, and that people
are not at all times disposed to be informed. Fancy may easily bring
before the reader the sort of conversation which Mrs. Montagu was able
to hold with Mr. Plunket. She says of it: “Some people reduce their wit
to an impalpable powder, and mix it up in a rebus; others wrap up theirs
in a riddle: but mine and Mr. Plunket’s certainly went off by insensible
perspiration in small talk.” She was so satisfied that there was a right
place for a wise man to play the fool in, that she expressed a hope to
Gilbert West (who was turning much of her thought from this world to the
next) and to his wife, that “you will, both of you, leave so much of your
wisdom at Wickham as would be inconvenient in town.” West feared that, at
Sandleford, she sent invitations to beaux and belles to fill the vacant
apartments of her mind. She merrily answered, that there was empty space
enough there for French hoops and echoes of French sentiments; but she
also seriously replied, “There are few of the fine world whom I should
invite into my mind, and fewer still who are familiar enough there to
come unasked.”
Mrs. Montagu hated no man, but she thoroughly despised Warburton. The way
he mauled Shakespeare by explaining him, excited her scornful laughter;
the way in which he marred Christianity by defending it, excited much
more than angry contempt. “The levity shocks me, the indecency displeases
me, the _grossièreté_ disgusts me. I love to see the doctrine of
Christianity defended by the spirit of Christianity.” Bishop Warburton
and some country parsons were equally silly in her mind. Of a poor
riddle, she says, “A country parson could not puzzle his parish with it,
even if he should endeavour to explain it in his next Sunday’s sermon.
Though I have known some of them explain a thing till all men doubted it.”
From the rule by which she measured all men, she did not except any one
of her brothers: and never did sister love her brothers more tenderly
and reasonably. Her brother William, the clergyman, was restless in
temper from excess of love of ease. “My brother Robinson,” she wrote to
her sister, Mrs. Scott, in 1755, “is emulating the great Diogenes ...
he flies the delights of London, and leads a life of such privacy and
seriousness, as looks to the beholders like wisdom, but, for my part, no
life of inaction deserves that name.” Other characters she strikes off in
a single sentence. That referring to Sir Charles Williams is a very good
sample from an overflowing measure. “Sir Charles,” she said, “is still
so flighty, that had he not always been a wit, he would still pass for a
madman!” When she refers to Lord Hyde’s printed, but never acted comedy,
“The Mistakes, or the Happy Resentment,” and says, “I suppose you will
read the play, as it is by so great a man,” she was probably thinking of
Miss Tibbs, who, “it is well known, always showed her good breeding by
devoting all her attention to the people of highest rank in the company.”
Mrs. Montagu was as clever at generalities as when sketching individuals
and special peculiarities. The numerous Jews at Tunbridge Wells, in
1745, she describes as having “worse countenances than their friend
Pontius Pilate in a bad tapestry-hanging.” Good farmer’s wife as she
said of herself, and also very fond of refined luxury, she laughed in
her letters at those persons who built palaces in gardens of beauty, and
left, as she said, nothing rude and waste but their minds; nothing harsh
and unpolished but their tempers. To her, no knowledge came amiss. Amid
all the gaieties of the life at Bath, she took interest in the chemistry
of every-day life. During one of her visits, she was initiated into the
mysteries of making malt!
Her very affectations, as they were called, sprung from her endowments.
Her learning and reading, and intercourse with scholars and thinkers,
furnished her with extraordinary figures and illustrations that were
applied to very ordinary uses.
Neither Elizabeth Robinson nor Mrs. Montagu would be so commonplace as
to say the moon shone, but “the silver Cynthia held up her lamp in the
heavens.” She could readily detect and denounce this learned affectation,
this sacrifice of the natural to the classical in others; and she said
with truth of Hammond’s “Elegies,” “They please me much, but between you
and me, they seem to me to have something of a foreign air. Had the poet
read Scotch ballads oftener, and Ovid and Tibullus less, he had appeared
a more natural writer and a more tender lover.” These terse sayings
are well worth collecting. Here is one from a heap that will furnish a
thousand “I own the conversation of a simpleton is a grievance, but there
the disparity of a wise man and a fool often ends.”
[Illustration: 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.