SOURCE: Wharton, Grace and Philip Wharton. “Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu.” In The Queens of Society, Vol. 2, pp. 222-47. London: J. W. Jarvis & Son, 1890.

[In the following essay, the authors provide a summary of Montagu's life, works, and significance.]

Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, in his Diary, speaks of Mrs. Montagu's ‘palace, as it would be termed at Rome or Naples, in Portman Square.’ ‘The palace’ exists: we see it, somewhat secluded from public gaze, yet not secluded as in the time of its first owner, when it was encompassed with fields. In spring the earliest budding trees shade its entrance; in autumn the planes and elms near it are the first to shed their leaves. Compared with modern edifices Montagu House is not even stately: it is, at all events, only so because it stands apart; but it has the dignity of tradition. Within those walls, now blackened by London smoke, lived as benevolent a being as ever was intrusted by Providence with a noble fortune. Until lately, the chimney-sweepers, commemorating her consideration for their despised condition, danced every May-day before the door whence she was wont to issue—a grotesque tribute to the kindness that has been exalted into a still higher attribute in the world of spirits. The drawing-rooms in which she assembled the society which was first there called the ‘Blue Stockings’ are still inhabited by her descendants. Montagu House is one of the landmarks of modern society: let us hope that it will not be swept away, but will last, with her memory who built it, to our children's children.

Favoured by nature and fortune, Elizabeth Montagu had the advantage of being one of a large family. Her father, Matthew Robinson, a large landed proprietor in Yorkshire, in Cambridgeshire, and in Kent, had by his wife, Elizabeth, the daughter and heiress of Robert Drake, twelve children. How low down in the scale Elizabeth came, her nephew and biographer, who seems anxious to say as little about her as he can, does not inform us. She was, however, descended on her father's side from the Robinsons of Rokeby, who were ennobled in the reign of George II. by the Irish peerage of Rokeby of Armagh.

Elizabeth was born at York on the 2nd of October, 1720. Her father, who was a man of considerable acquirements and devoted to society, had made the mistake of marrying at eighteen, and deemed it, therefore, prudent to live chiefly in the country, though pining for the delights of the town. He revenged himself on fortune, nevertheless, and punished his large family for coming into the world by dozens, by giving himself up to occasional fits of the spleen, to which indulgence he naturally considered himself entitled. He was very witty and sarcastic, and soon perceived that his daughter Elizabeth resembled him in those respects: and, as she grew up, their encounters were ofttimes somewhat sharp.

Mr. Robinson was fond of the arts; and, among the other avocations with which he sought to solace a country life, he undertook to teach his little Elizabeth drawing. But even here her merry spirit broke bounds. ‘If you design to make any proficiency in that art,’ she wrote to her friend the Duchess of Portland, ‘I would advise you not to draw old men's heads. It was the rueful countenance of Socrates or Seneca that first put me out of conceit with it. Had my papa given me the blooming faces of Adonis and Narcissus I might have been a more apt scholar; and when I told him I found those great beards difficult to draw, he gave me St. John's head in a charger; so, to avoid the speculation of dismal faces, which by my art I dismalled ten times more than they were before, I threw away my pencil.’ Her success did not, indeed, seem to promise well. ‘I have heard,’ she adds, ‘of some who have been famous landscape painters; of others who have been famous battle painters; but I take myself to have been the best hospital painter, for I never drew a figure that was not lame or blind, and they had all something of the horrible in their countenances; and by the arching of their eyebrows and the opening of their mouths they looked so frightened you would have thought they had seen their own faces in the glass.’

When she was seven years old a circumstance occurred which gave an impetus to the direction of Elizabeth Robinson's tastes and studies. Her uncle dying, her mother inherited an estate at Coveney in Cambridgeshire, and of course some months of every year were henceforth passed at that property. Hitherto Mr. Robinson had spent his winters in York, as it was then customary to make the county town a residence for the country families. In the summer he had removed to West Layton in the same county, and to Edgeley in Wensleydale. But he now frequently lived at Coveney, near the University of Cambridge, in which he had been a gentleman commoner.

He thus introduced his family into the very heart of all that was witty and talented: more especially as Mrs. Drake, his wife's mother, had for her second husband selected Dr. Conyers Middleton, the author of the Life of Cicero. Dr. Middleton perceived at once the acuteness of Elizabeth Robinson's understanding and the sensibility which softened her stronger qualities. Elizabeth was the darling of the University; she was surpassingly beautiful as well as intelligent. Like Madame de Staël, before she was eight years old she had listened with interest to the conversations of the learned: all that was said sank deeply into her memory.

Dr. Middleton watched her with delight. He insisted on her repeating to him all she heard; he allowed her age to be no excuse; and she owned, in after life, that she had derived great benefit from the habit of attention thus inculcated. At the same time was engendered a value for learning and for the learned. Whilst her letters were full of all the gaiety of a girl, they diverged at times into reflections scarcely to be expected in so young, so flattered, so fashionable a belle. Her studies were Cicero, Plutarch's Lives, Cornelius Nepos, Pliny. Neither she nor her friend the Duchess of Portland appeared to think that there was anything inconsistent with the character of a fine lady in being well read: in reflecting seriously and even deeply in not looking upon this life as one of all pleasure. Her brothers were also devoted to literary pursuits, and became in early life distinguished scholars. So frequent were the arguments in the domestic circles, and so resolute the endeavour to outshine each other, that Mrs. Robinson, gentle and judicious, was often obliged to interpose; hence the bright party around her gave her the name of the ‘Speaker,’ and, it may be supposed, bowed to her remonstrances.

Notwithstanding the sensation which the little Elizabeth (afterwards the celebrated Mrs. E. Montagu) produced at Cambridge, she found it ‘the dullest place, affording neither anything entertaining or ridiculous enough to put into a letter.’ The love of society dawned in her at a very early period of her life, and this she inherited from her father.

‘Though tired of the country, I am not,’ she wrote when twelve years old, ‘to my great satisfaction, half so much so as my papa; he is a little vapoured; and last night, after two hours' silence, he broke into a great exclamation against the country, and concluded with saying, that living in the country was sleeping with one's eyes open: if he sleeps all day, I am sure he dreams very much of London.’

Poor Mr. Robinson became, in spite of ‘saffron in his tea,’ irretrievably afflicted with the spleen; some provincial gaieties varied, indeed, his existence and that of his gay young daughters; but this was only when they were passing the winter, as sometimes happened, in the less wild regions of Kent instead of Yorkshire. Then for their delight an assembly was set on foot eight miles from Mount Morris. Ten coaches honoured the great occasion, and a full moon illumined it: but company was wanting, so the Lady Paramount called in all the parsons, apprentices, tradesmen, apothecaries and farmers, milliners and haberdashers of small wares, to make up the ball. ‘Here,’ wrote Elizabeth in all the impertinence of thirteen, ‘sails a reverend parson; there skips an airy apprentice; here jumps a farmer; and then every one has an eye to their trade: the miliner pulls you by the hand till she tears your glove; the mantua-maker treads on your petticoat until she unrips the seams; the shoemaker makes you foot it till you wear out your shoes; the mercer dirties your gown; the apothecary opens the window behind you that you may be sick; and the parson calls out for “Joan Saunderson.”’

Mr. Robinson, it appeared, enjoyed on this occasion what we should in all our finery now call ‘a very mixed assembly,’ with all the spirits of a newly-awakened man; forgot his twenty years of wedlock and his nice children, and ‘danced as nimbly as any of the quorum.’ Now and then he was mortified by hearing the ladies cry, ‘Old Mr. Robinson! change sides and turn your daughter.’ Other ladies who wished to appear young, exclaim, ‘Well, there is poor grandpapa, he could no more dance so!’ Then an old bachelor of fifty shakes him by the hand and cries, ‘Why, you dance like one of us young fellows!’ Another, by way of compliment, adds, ‘Who would think you had six fine children taller than yourself?’ ‘I protest if I did not know you I should take you to be young,’ simpers the most antiquated virgin in the company; ‘Mr. Robinson, wears mighty well: my mother says he looks as well as ever she remembers him. He used to come often to the house when I was a girl.’ How little is the world changed since then! Mr. Robinson, his saucy daughter observed, had not the ‘hyp’ in this company; ‘but indeed,’ she says, ‘it is a distemper so well bred as never to come but when people are at home and at leisure.’

Whilst thus growing up, Elizabeth formed an acquaintance which, like most of those made in early youth, greatly influenced her tastes if not her destiny. This friend was Lady Margaret Cavendish Harley, the only daughter of Edward Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, by his wife Lady Henrietta Cavendish, daughter and heiress of John Holles Duke of Newcastle. Lady Margaret, when first the juvenile friendship was formed with Elizabeth—or, as she wrote to her, ‘Mrs. Eliza Robinson’—was eighteen years of age, whilst Elizabeth was scarcely twelve. Lady Margaret was the heiress of a large fortune, and married, long before her friend was old enough to enter the world, William the second Duke of Portland, and the leader of the Whig party. After becoming a duchess she proved to be a woman of unbounded munificence, and lived with splendid hospitality, chiefly at Bulstrode, in Buckinghamshire, where persons of high rank, more especially those eminent for talent, resorted. To her this country is deeply indebted for the preservation of the Harleian MSS. in the British Museum, which she gave to the country. To her liberality we also owe the introduction of many valuable objects of art, more especially that of the Barberini or Portland vase into England.

To this friend Elizabeth Robinson's letters are chiefly addressed. As she grew up she became a habituée of that titled and intellectual circle which has perhaps never been surpassed in England. Their friendship lasted many years, and became of the most intimate character. It was the first that Elizabeth ever formed: the esteem she says, ‘having grown with her’ since she first loved the Lady Margaret ‘and her doll.’

From the commencement of this friendship until her marriage, Elizabeth's life seems to have been cloudless. Sometimes we hear of her going eight miles to dance to the music of a blind fiddler, and coming back at two o'clock in the morning ‘mightily pleased.’ Sometimes after she and her family dressing for a ball, and ‘getting into the coach with their ball airs,’ they were turned back by a brook being swollen, and so much did she take it to heart that she could think of nothing but the ball. ‘When any one asked me how I did, I cried out, “Tit for tat;” and when they bid me sit down I answered, “Jack of the Green”’—the names of fashionable dances at that time. Sometimes she writes still merrily of a past illness; she has ‘swallowed the weight of an apothecary in medicine,’ and is not the better, except that she is less patient and less credulous. She still confesses to being fond of gadding, and furious with her barrister brother, who goes down to the sessions, and ‘when he had sold all his law, packed up his saleable eloquence, and carried it back to Lincoln's Inn, there to be left till called for,’ yet he never went to the assize ball. Sometimes she goes to races for ‘the good of the country,’ and is always ready to dance to a Whig or a Tory tune; ‘for she was not like dancing monkeys, who only cut capers for King George.’ Then we find her banished to Canterbury, on account of the small-pox at home, and staying at a prebend's house, where there were nothing but visits from prebends, ‘deacons, and the rest of our church militant here on earth.’ In vain do three out of her seven brothers go to see her: she confesses to be tired of the study of divines. Next she takes her flight to Bath, where she expects that ‘with the spirits the waters give, and the spirits of the place, she shall be perfect sal volatile, and open her mouth and evaporate.’ Then, not hearing from her friend, whom she always addresses as ‘your Grace,’ her lively fancy dictates a letter from the shades below; she writes her epistle with the pen with which Mrs. Rowe used to write her letters from the dead to the living, and begs it may be laid where it cannot hear the cock crow, or it will vanish, having died a maid. So active, indeed, was the merry Eliza's mind and body that the duchess gave her the name of ‘la petite Fidget.’

At Bath, nevertheless, the ‘height of her happiness’ proved nothing better than a ‘pair royal at commerce and a peer of threescore,’ who greatly prefers a queen of spades to her. Still she is amused, and tells, with great gusto, an anecdote of a lady of quality, who was very tall, and who nearly drowned a few women in the cross bath, which she ordered to be filled till it reached her chin, so that those who were below her stature, as well as below her rank, were obliged to ‘cut or drown.’

Her twentieth year came, and found her without any serious thoughts of matrimony, the ‘more reasonable passion of friendship’ filling her heart. Perhaps, from the following passage in one of her letters it might be that a dower was wanting. ‘What is a woman,’ she asks, ‘without gold or fee simple?—a toy while she is young, a trifle when she is old. Jewels of the first water are good for nothing till they are set; but as for us, we are no brilliants, nobody's money till we have a foil and are encompassed with the precious metal. As for the intrinsic value of a woman, few know it, and nobody cares. Lord Foppington appraised all the female virtues and bought them in under a thousand pounds sterling, and the whole sex have agreed no one better understood the value of womankind.’ Yet she passed much of her time at Whitehall, the Duke of Portland being in office, and went to every imaginable species of London gaiety; sat to Zincke in the dress of Queen Anne Boleyn for her picture, and was evidently one of the belles most in vogue about the middle of the last century. Meantime the number of her correspondents augmented; Mrs. Donnellan, the friend of Swift, and Dr. Freind, afterwards Dean of Canterbury, were among those to whom she wrote when in serious mood. In the midst of this hurry of life she was again banished for fear of the fatal small-pox to a Kentish farm-house with nothing modern about it. Here she sat in an old crimson velvet chair, that she imagined must have been elder brother to that shown in Westminster Abbey as Edward the Confessor's. ‘Tables there were in the room with more feet than caterpillars;’ a ‘toilette that might have been worked by one of Queen Maud's maids of honour; and a looking-glass which Rosamond or Jane Shore might have dressed their heads in.’ Then the old clock, which ‘had struck the blessed minutes of the Reformation, Restoration, Abdication, Revolution, and Accession,’ seemed, she fancied, from its relation to time, to have some to eternity. This banishment, however, had its uses, in weaning from the world to reflection one worthy of being rescued from a mere life of vanity. ‘Cicero and Plutarch's heroes were her only company.’ She does not at this period mention those works of religious improvement which afterwards formed the consolation of her old age. Yet not long afterwards she thus writes: ‘Few are the hours allowed to freedom, to leisure, to contemplation, to the adoration of our Maker, the examination of ourselves, and the consideration of the things about us.’ ‘Few there are that remember their Creator in the days of their youth, and trust to Him in their decline. We put off all things but death.’ It was not until the year 1742, when Elizabeth Robinson was twenty-two years of age, that we find her signing herself E. Montagu. The choice which she made was consistent with that calm good sense which always gave a value to her letters and conversation. Long before she had made up her mind as to what manner of man should be her guide, her companion, and her master. Four years previously, she had denied the soft impeachment of being about to marry, and had then described her beau idéal to her friend the duchess.

‘At present,’ she wrote, ‘I will tell you what sort of a man I desire, which is above ten times as good as I deserve. He should have a great deal of sense to instruct me; much wit to divert me; beauty to please me; good humour to indulge me when I am right, and reprove me gently when I am in the wrong; money enough to afford me more than I can want, and as much as I can wish; and constancy to like me as long as other people do, that is, till my face is wrinkled by age or scarred by the small-pox; and after that I shall expect only civility in the room of love, for as Mrs. Clive sings—

‘All I hope of mortal man
Is to love me while he can.’

She was, she owned, like Pygmalion, in love with a picture of her own drawing, and had never then seen the original.

The object of her choice proved to be Edward Montagu of Denton Hall, Northumberland, and Sandleford Priory in Berkshire. He was a man of an ancient and honourable family, and of considerable abilities, which were chiefly employed in the House of Commons in the service of the Whigs. His estates, which he bequeathed to his wife, were considerable, so that one part of her wish was certainly fulfilled. How far the marriage was one, on her part, of attachment seems questionable. The ceremony of marriage was performed on the 5th of August, 1743, by Dr. Freind; her respected correspondent, to whom she refers, when writing to the Duchess of Portland, to prove that she shed not at the altar, ‘one single tear;’ ‘yet,’ she adds, ‘my mind was in no mirthful mood indeed.’ ‘I have,’ she adds, ‘a great hope of happiness; the world as you say, speaks well of Mr. Montagu, and I have many obligations to him, which must gain my particular esteem; but such a change of life must furnish one with a thousand anxious thoughts.’ And with this cool and sensible view she began her married life.

By her friend and preceptor, Conyers Middleton, the union was, however, hailed as between a blooming and intellectual bride with a man ‘not only of figure and fortune, but of great knowledge and understanding.’ But it seemed that the very cultivation of that understanding was to Mrs. Montagu a source of sorrow. Mr. Montagu was a great mathematician for that day, but set, to borrow the words of Dr. Beattie, ‘too much value on mathematical evidence, and piqued himself too much on his knowledge of that science.’ In other words, he was sceptical; and his wife, when she perceived him in the decline of life, without that light, devoid of which all here is dark indeed, endeavoured, through Dr. Beattie, to bring his mind from that fallacious philosophy, in which he fatally confided, to faith and religious hope; but, it appears, without the much-desired effect.

Henceforth a great portion of Mrs. Montagu's life was passed in the country, where her cheerful temper and neighbourly habits endeared her to all near the different abodes in which she resided. Atterthorpe, about a day's journey from Doncaster, and beautifully situated on the River Swale, was one of the first places that she visited after a journey of six days from Kent. Here she often went to the almshouse, and the schools founded by her uncle, ‘where the young were taught industry, the old content;’ and found her happiness in her fireside, and that only when it was not ‘littered with queer creatures.’ She had not, in the midst of her pining after London and its charms, ceased to take delight in nature, and describes to her friend, Mrs. Donnellan, that wild tract called the Dales, with enthusiasm. Yet she owned herself a very swallow, as she could not abide in the country in winter; confessed she had a tendency to dulness; that she loved to be a spectator of the rapid world whilst her ‘little machine’ was at rest; and that the ‘lullaby’ of country conversation affected her with drowsiness; the news and chat of her own neighbourhood affecting her no more than the ‘Jewish Chronicle’ did a modern infidel prime minister. She was, indeed, formed to be the ‘Queen of the Blues.’

Meantime, she was finding out her husband's perfections, his integrity, benevolence, and strong affections. Ill health came, however, to dash her felicity, and Mr. Montagu was obliged to have her at Atterthorpe, and to attend Parliament. ‘I help him on,’ she wrote, ‘with honour's boots, and behold him go without murmuring.’ He left her sister with her; there was an extraordinary likeness between them, hence Mrs. Montagu always called her sister, ‘Rea.’ Rea was blessed with a temper of continual sunshine, and made even the dulness of the country endurable to her poor ‘Fidget.’

Mrs. Montagu had now hopes of becoming a mother. This she viewed with her usual good sense, and with the faith that had survived or withstood the contagion of Dr. Middleton's opinions. Mrs. Delany describes her as looking, before this event, ‘handsome, fat, and merry, &c.’ She remarked that in our addresses to Heaven, we should only be earnest in thanksgiving. Much as she wished to have children, and that ‘her affections might be kept living in those she loved,’ she dared not trust herself to desire objects of so near concern and fondness as children. A son was born: ‘the young Fidget,’ as she called him, loved laughing and dancing, and was worthy of the mother he sprang from. He seemed well and strong, and his mother's letters are, for some time, the short period of his little life, full of hopes, and prayers, and fondness. Her domestic happiness seemed perfect. Early in the September of 1744 her child died of convulsions. The blow was terrible; and no other offspring were ever granted to make it a less fearful blank.

‘I am well enough,’ she wrote to the Duchess of Portland, as to health of body, but God knows the sickness of the soul is far worse. I know it is my duty to be resigned and to submit. I hope time will bring me comfort. I will give it my best endeavours: it is in afflictions like mine that reason ought to exert itself, else one would fall beneath the stroke. She tried to solace herself by reading, and to control her feelings by the example of her afflicted husband. She hoped the same Providence that snatched this dear blessing from her would give her others; but the hope was not fulfilled. Elizabeth Montagu, then twenty-three years of age, had a long life before her. Beauty, talents, fortune, friends, a happy marriage, influence in society, a gay genial temper, were hers. But she was henceforth childless.

She was now in her maturity, of the middle stature, with a slight stoop, so that the fire of her beautiful deep blue eyes was somewhat subdued by an air of modesty; her dark brown hair clustering over her throat and face; her high arched eyebrows; her complexion, notwithstanding the attacks made on it by the envious, singularly brilliant and yet delicate, completed the charms of her person; her manners as dignified as they were polished: with all these advantages she may have been sought by the wisest and best men (who have never any objection to youth and beauty) of her time. The scholar and the politician, the wit, the critic, the orator crowded around her. Her wit was so abundant, so fresh, so involuntary, that she found it difficult to temper it, and to adapt it to society. But her extreme good nature and good breeding brought it under control. It was never coarse, never disagreeable. She could curb it at the right point. The gaiety of her disposition, her love of society, never drew her into folly. Discreett, correct, the admiration felt for her was that which we feel for purity and elevation of mind. Talking of ‘her young family’ as cordially as if she had been married these three years.

She was happy in her friends, Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, Young the poet, Gilbert West, Lord Chatham, Stillingfleet, Beattie, Lord Kaimes, Burke, and last, not least, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Garrick, were amongst those who honoured and visited her. She chose her friends for their merits, not for their station; yet she had all society to choose from. She was, nevertheless, accused by Miss Burney and Mrs. Thrale of want of heart, and considered by those two ladies as a character to respect rather than to love: ‘wanting that don d'aimer by which alone love can be made fond or faithful.’ Nevertheless her affections to her own family are apparent in every line of Mrs. Montagu's letters. It is possible that her circle of friends was too large for her regard for them to be very deep; and years after her marriage we find her writing to Mrs. Elizabeth Carter: ‘You and I, who have never been in love,’ a sort of acknowledgment that her marriage was, like almost every other action of her life, the result of reason. So far Miss Burney's opinion of her seems to be confirmed.

Henceforth, Mrs. Montagu appears to belong to society alone. The last century, it has been well remarked, formed an era in all matters of taste: the arts, long dispelled by civil commotions, had been degraded during the reign of Charles II. into the subservient office of portrait painting; they were happily revived, in the very hey-day of Mrs. Montagu's life, by the genius of Reynolds. Not only as an artist, but as a man of intellect and refinement, Reynolds infused into the higher classes that love of art which has never since died out amongst them. The society at his house, easy and inexpensive, though composed almost entirely of the most eminent people of his time, may have suggested to Mrs. Montagu that assemblage of literati, which soon acquired the name of the ‘Blue Stockings;’ and ‘to do a bit of Blue,’ as Dr. Burney said, came into vogue.

Reynolds, whilst at that time painting portraits at twelve guineas a head, used to assemble Dr. Johnson, Richard Cumberland, Edmund Burke, the Thrales, and Mrs. Montagu, not to mention many others who sat around the fire on which sang the tea-kettle which Johnson wished ‘might never be cold;’ Reynolds, ‘the man who could not,’ as Johnson well observed, ‘be spoiled by prosperity,’ found it essential for his mental powers to mix in intellectual society; and, aided by Johnson, established the ‘Literary Club.’ This famous society met at the Turk's Head, in Gerrard Street, Soho, every Monday evening, not to a costly, heavy dinner, but to supper. The standing toast was Mrs. Montagu; who for two successive years invited the club to a dinner at her house, curiosity being her motive, and possibly a desire to mingle with their conversation the charm of her own.

During the early part of her long life Mrs. Montagu had distinguished herself by an Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakspeare, a composition which vindicated our immortal dramatist from the gross attacks of Voltaire. She had also published three Dialogues of the Dead, which were printed with those of Lord Lyttelton. In the meridian of her days she delighted to assemble around her, in an easy manner, those whose merits she could so well appreciate. For many years her time was divided between Sandleford Priory, near Newbury, and Hill Street. When in London, she received an assemblage of intellectual persons, at first unpremeditatedly; and the only difference between these receptions and those of the fashionable world was, that cards were not introduced. The party did not consist, as literary parties are usually thought to do, solely of those who had written something; but was made up of actors, beaux, divines, and pretty or agreeable women. By the side of the learned Elizabeth Carter was found the brilliant Mrs. Boscawen, whose husband, Admiral Boscawen, glancing at Dr. Stillingfleet's grey stockings—that learned divine being an oddity and a sloven—gave these meetings the name of the ‘Blue-stocking Society,’ merely meaning that the full dress, then de riguer (as still abroad) in the evening, was to be dispensed with.

‘Oh!’ cried a foreigner of distinction, catching up the expression, ‘Les bas bleus!’ and the sobriquet is still applied to all who assume the literary character.

There was, however, as Hannah More has told us, in her poem on the Blues, no parade of knowledge in this agreeable assembly. Learning was not disfigured by pedantry, nor good taste tinctured by affectation. The general conversation was free from calumny or levity; the presiding genius, graceful and good as she was, seemed to cast her mantle over the whole.

Garrick, who, as Johnson said, ‘had made his profession respectable, whilst it made him rich,’ was a favourite guest of Mrs. Montagu's. ‘He was the only actor,’ Johnson remarked, ‘who had ever been a master both of tragedy and comedy.’ ‘And yet,’ added the great moralist, ‘I thought him less to be envied on the stage than at the head of a dinner-table:’ a sentiment in which Mrs. Montagu concurred.

Destined first for the bar, next a wine-merchant, finally the founder of the modern stage, how pleasant must have been Garrick's anecdote; what a relief after the scholar-like talk of Lord Lyttelton, the responsive pedantry of Mrs. Carter, and the propriety of Mrs. Chapone! One can fancy him telling the anecdote of his sitting to a poor painter, not very skilful, and when a certain progress had been made in the portrait, changing his countenance whilst the artist's back was turned; and when the patient man had worked on so as to alter the likeness, and make it what he then saw, how he had seized the opportunity, and changed his expression a third time; how the ill-used painter had thrown down his pallet and pencils, exclaiming, that he perceived he was painting the devil, and would touch the canvas no more.

How amusing, also, must it have been to hear Garrick bantering Johnson about the Cock-lane Ghost, a tale which the superstitious Johnson credited, but which the player disbelieved! Horace Walpole, in his prime, when first these meetings were in vogue, but latterly, when Dr. Beattie saw him in 1791, though still ‘well bred, and of pleasant discourse, martyred by the gout;’ Lord Lyttelton, who was supposed to have felt for Mrs. Montagu a tenderer sentiment than that of friendship; and the great Lord Chatham, were the constant visitors of Mrs. Montagu's house.

In the latter part of the last century, that which was once an intimate circle became so fashionable a resort, that the rooms of Montagu House were thronged, and the intimate, tea-drinking, social character of the assembly merged into one far less agreeable. It must have been then that Mrs. Montagu was sometimes, according to Miss Burney, ‘brilliant in diamonds, solid in judgment, critical in talk; sometimes flashy, and an immense talker; but still eminently courteous and agreeable.’

After Mrs. Montagu took possession of Montagu House, her entertainments were given on a scale of great splendour. Miss Burney describes a grand breakfast, at which all the company ate enormously, though, as it was remarked, had Mrs. Montagu invited them to dinner at three o'clock, her friends would have exclaimed, ‘What does it mean? Who can dine at three o'clock?’

The gallery of Montagu House was, on that occasion, thronged by the survivors of those early friends whom Mrs. Montagu had so delighted to collect as her Blue-stocking circle. Seward, the compiler of the Anecdotes, the Burneys and Boscawens were there; but Garrick, Johnson, and Reynolds were gone; and the sceptical and intellectual master of the house had disappeared from the scene. In 1755 Mr. Montagu died, as Dr. Beattie affirms, in ‘extreme old age,’ so that he must have been many years his wife's senior. His wife's efforts were directed, during his last days, to his eternal welfare, upon which Dr. Beattie held many conferences with him, but, it appears, without any satisfactory result.

Happily, from amongst her family ties, Mrs. Montagu found still some objects for that affection which only the links of blood can endear. She adopted Matthew, the son of her eldest brother, Matthew Robinson; and bequeathing to him her whole fortune, required him to take the name of Montagu. To this descendant, who became in 1829 fourth Baron Rokeby, we owe the publication of Mrs. Montagu's letters; and on him devolved the office of an editor, which he performed with as little pains and care as possible. The present gallant Lord Rokeby is the great nephew of Mrs. Montagu. It was of Matthew Montagu that Sir Nathaniel Wraxall related, ‘that General Montagu Matthew said in the House of Commons, upon some mistake relative to their identity, “that there was no more likeness between Montagu Matthew and Matthew Montagu than between a chestnut horse and a horse-chestnut.”’ Having been brought up under his aunt's especial care, Mr. Montagu is said to have received an education far more suited to make a man of letters than a statesman. He appears not to have distinguished himself in either of those capacities.

One turns reluctantly from the bright yet quiet circle of the original bas bleus to the gayer receptions of Mrs. Montagu's later days. In the early part of her reign, as a ‘Queen of Society,’ her empire was divided with the famous Viscountess Townshend, at whose house a more fashionable, and perhaps a less unexceptionable class of littérateurs used to meet without ceremony in the evenings. Lady Townshend, who succeeded Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Lady Hervey, had figured as a leader of society. Here George Selwyn, Charles Fox, and Sheridan, who was just in the dawn of that career which even Pitt allowed to be full of eloquence and the powers of fancy, but which he represented to be devoid of reason and truth, shone conspicuously and in other bright spheres, until reckless habits and vices obscured their career. The political and literary clique at Lady Townshend's was now extinct; and Whitehall had ceased to be the centre of wit and fashion since 1788.

Every year, on the other hand, until her death, added to Mrs. Montagu's enlarging circle of votaries. Hers was the very house which is now so greatly wanted in London, where there is no point of union for persons of congenial tastes and pursuits; and no intimate evening society, as in France, in which the pleasures of conversation may be enjoyed with nothing but the bouillote on the table, the brioche by the fire. Nothing can be worse than the present form of metropolitan society for the intellect, the spirits, the health. ‘I know half the west end of London,’ said the late Lord Dudley to the late eminent surgeon, Mr. Copeland, ‘and yet there is not a house in which I could walk in and ask a cup of tea.’ Always on the defensive, the English hedge round everything that is agreeable with exclusiveness, and encumber it with ostentation: and even were Mrs. Montagu, in all her perfection of mind, person, and position to arise from the dead, to light up the gallery and the drawing-rooms, and call the spirits of the departed from their tombs, we should, I fear, consider her parties as ‘very mixed.’ For though she was herself well-born, the associate of duchesses and countesses, rich and gracious, she was un-English enough to call into her presence the lowly born, ‘under-bred people,’ if eminent in any way, and harsh enough to banish thence titled sinners of both sexes. We are more liberal now to the sinful, and less indulgent to the unrefined!

Mrs. Montagu, for instance, brought into the unshrinking contact of prime ministers and leaders of ton, James Beattie, the son of a small retail dealer at Lawrence-Kirk, in the county of Kincardine—his father, a man who kept what is called ‘the shop,’ in his native village. She cherished, she assisted him; and, with equal mauvais ton, dropped the acquaintance of Thomas, the bad Lord Lyttelton, the pleasantest scapegrace that ever sullied by misdeeds a good name. Thomas Lord Lyttelton was a ‘meteor whose rapid extinction could not be regretted;’ but Beattie was like the evening star, whose light we hail as the harbinger of repose. Thomas Lord Lyttelton was the spoiled child of fortune. Vain, elegant, and profligate, in the morning, he was, as Mr. Curtis said, ‘melancholy, squalid, disgusting, and half repentant; in the evening the delight, the admiration, and the leader of society; always fearful and superstitious, yet not religious.’ For while his youthful and almost handsome face, with the hair turned back over a wide forehead, his bag wig, his exquisite ruffles, and an expression half good-humoured, half sarcastic, might be seen in the great assemblies at Montagu House, where he was long tolerated for his father's sake: but he soon became too notorious for any society, and vanished from his own sphere into a lower orbit. His death was predicted to him when in the last stage of decline—at thirty-five years of age—by an apparition in the form of a young lady whom he had seduced. The hour was foretold; and though his friends set the clock on, he expired to the minute that she had predicted. This is the only ghost story in modern times that has been carefully investigated and minutely recorded; and the short account of it is inscribed on a brass plate in the house near Epsom in which the titled sinner died. The three last years of his existence were passed in penitence, and in an attempt at reform; but the period, as one of his friends wrote, ‘of his emancipation from the fetters of pleasure and indolence also marked his dissolution.’ Such was the detestation of his character that his funeral took place at night, for fear that the people of Hagley should tear his remains from the coffin in fury.

Thomas Lord Lyttelton was a splendid speaker, and a wit, a Maccaroni (or dandy) of the first class, a man of wonderful fascination: perhaps in the reign of Charles II. he might have been almost respectable; with all his wickedness he must have been a brilliant person in society. Dr. Beattie, on the contrary, educated at the parish-school of Lawrence-Kirk, then himself a schoolmaster, knowing, for many a long year, no better society than that which a peasant's cottage affords; next a professor at Aberdeen, a pedagogue, speaking broad Scotch, must have been one of the most virtuous bores in existence. But he had, though, as we now think, feebly, the seeds of poetic excellence in him: he was pious, hard-working, patient; yet even in his prime he could not have been a very agreeable object. ‘For have I not,’ he says to his friend Charles Boyd, ‘headaches, like Pope? vertigo like Swift? gray hairs, like Homer? Do I not wear large shoes, for fear of corns, like Virgil? and sometimes complain of sore eyes, like Horace?’ He seems to have had all the infirmities of these great men without their genius.

When he was thirty-two years of age, he became known to Mrs. Montagu by report. For his own part he regarded her as an honour to her sex and to human nature. Even then he talked of his broken health; but soon afterwards a fearful calamity happened to him. His wife, Mary Dun, daughter of the rector of the grammar-school at Aberdeen, had inherited insanity from her mother; and was herself sufficiently wrongheaded to make others wretched, but not to be placed under restraint. Eventually her state, which made poor Beattie inconceivably miserable, broke out into madness.

He had his mother also to support: his means were so limited that he was intoxicated with delight when £52 10s. were paid him by the publisher for his famous Essay on Truth, which it had taken him four years to write, and which he had written three times over; yet the worthy son of the retail dealer is to be envied, in stern compassion with the once idolized heir of the grave and good George Lord Lyttelton.

In 1771, Beattie went to London, and was introduced by Dr. Gregory, the author of A Father's Legacy to his Daughters, to Mrs. Montagu. Never, certainly, was an author more plentifully rewarded with fame than was Beattie for his Essay on Truth to say nothing of his poetry. He received a degree at Oxford and was ordered to Kew Green, where he had an interview with George III. and his queen. ‘I never stole a book but one,’ said the kind-hearted monarch, ‘and that was yours; I stole it from the queen to give it to Lord Hertford to read.’ Then his majesty entering into conversation, said he could not believe ‘that any thinking man could be an Atheist, unless he could bring himself to believe that he made himself,’ an idea that seemed so satisfactory, that King George repeated it two or three times to the queen. Beattie received also the more substantial benefit of a pension.

Nevertheless, unremitting anxieties marked the career of this good man. It was his fate to lose a beloved son, Mrs. Montagu's godson; to watch over his wife in all the various stages of her malady; and, expiring, to know that she who survived him was hopelessly insane.

He found in music, in which he was a fine performer, a source of infinite consolation. His slouching gait; his large, dark, melancholy eyes; his broad accent, and a kind of simplicity which was always gentle, but yet peculiar, must have marked him out to the derision of the beau monde of Portman Square. Short were his periods of peace or rest. ‘Ever since the commencement of our vacation,’ he wrote, in 1790, to Sir William Forbes, ‘I have been passing from one scene of perplexity and sorrow to another.’ At last all was closed in death. Loved and mourned, he died three years after his kind friend, Mrs. Montagu. The famous Dr. Gregory, writing his epitaph on Mrs. Montagu, said, in 1799: ‘She has to me, on all occasions, ever since 1771, been a faithful and affectionate friend, especially in seasons of distress and difficulty.’ A simple but heartfelt encomium. To this excellent man was the regard given which was withheld from the dissolute and agreeable peer by the rightly thinking.

Yet the Queen of the Blue Stockings was eminently charitable in her judgments: ‘I would much rather, even in that very world where charity may be less in fashion than prudence, be accounted a person of inviolable charity than of infallible wisdom. In the hazards of a weak and fallible judgment, I had rather fall into error than into cruel injustice.’

Her useful and happy life was now drawing to its close.

She had ever, to use her own words, ‘enjoyed the present so as not to hurt the future.’ ‘Every day,’ she thought, ‘ought to be considered as a period apart; some virtue should be exercised; some knowledge improved, and the value of happiness well understood; some pleasure comprehended in it: some duty to ourselves or others must be infringed if any of these things are neglected.’

She had never wished for old age; yet length of years is usually allotted to women of letters, and was so to her.

Her decline was solaced by her own high thoughts, and cheered by the regard of all who knew her. Though nearly blind for many years, the hours that had never been misspent in cards—the fashionable pastime of that day—were not passed in repining. She had seen the seeds of gambling fostered in early youth. ‘If I had the education of a child of large fortune, it should not in its earliest infancy play a trick with a court-card. But, alas! it is too late that we taste the wormwood in these things.’ She had not now to regret that ‘whisk,’ as she writes it, and quadrille were to her impossible. She had ever esteemed the delights of friendship more highly than those of love; and certainly they failed her not in her old age.

‘Many guests,’ she wrote, ‘my heart has not admitted: such as there are do it honour, and a long and intimate acquaintance has preceded their admittance: they were invited in it by its best virtues; they passed through the examination of severity, nay, even answered some questions of suspicion that inquired of their constancy and sincerity; but now they are delivered over to the keeping of constant faith and love; for doubt never visits the friend entirely, but only examines such as would come in, lest the way should be too common.’ What a beautiful definition of friendship!—but it is, alas! of the friendship of the old school. Friends are now made with the speed of railroads, to be dropped at any station in life's journey, to get rid of them when they become a burden.

In her youth she had thus spoken of extreme old age:—‘If the near prospect of death is terrible, it is a melancholy thing when every day of added life is a miracle: but such is the happy and merciful order of things, that life is eternal, and therefore we cannot outlive it. It has for our amusement the midsummer's dream and the winter's tale: the car, deaf to all other music, is still soothed by its flattering voice.’

The Duchess of Portland died nearly fifteen years before Mrs. Montagu. Eight years previous to that event, Mrs. Montagu had visited Bulstrode, ‘the scene of more tender and sincere joy,’ when she returned to it, ‘than any other place.’ The dignity and piety which distinguished the duchess through life, the excellence of her conduct as a wife, a mother, and a friend, were not excelled by any lady of rank in her day.

Mrs. Montagu, in the decline of life, visited Dr. Gregory whose daughter long resided with her, at Edinburgh. When at Sandleford Priory, the benevolence of that heart which left a sum for the poor chimney-sweepers to enjoy one holiday in their dark life, showed itself in regard to the haymakers, thirty-six of whom she had at dinner under the shade of a grove in her garden.

When they worked well she loved to see them eat as well as labour, and often sent them a treat, to which the haymakers ‘brought an appetite that gave a better relish than the Madeira wine and Cayenne pepper in which an alderman stews his turtle.’

Two years before the close of the last century, Mrs. Montagu continued to receive company at home, although she had ceased to leave her house. ‘Mrs. Montagu is so broken down,’ Dr. Burney wrote to his daughter, ‘as not to go out—almost wholly blind and very feeble.’ During the ensuing year a report was even prevalent that she was dead: but her decease did not occur till the year 1800, when she expired at Montagu House, aged eighty.

Of this excellent woman Dr. Beattie says: ‘I have known several ladies in literature, but she excelled them all; and in conversation she had more wit than any other person, male or female.’

These, he adds, were her slighter accomplishments. ‘She was a sincere Christian, both in faith and practice, so that by her influence and example she did great good.’ Yet Mrs. Montagu was not so fortunate as to escape enemies: Dr. Johnson especially disliked one who had often eclipsed him. Nevertheless, Johnson, as Miss Burney asserts, did justice to Mrs. Montagu when others did not praise her improperly. He delighted in seeing her humbled.

‘To-morrow, sir,’ said Mrs. Thrale one day (at Streatham), ‘Mrs. Montagu dines with us, and then you will have talk enough.’ Johnson began to see-saw, and then, turning to Miss Burney, cried, ‘Down with her, Burney! down with her at once! spare her not! down with her! attack her! you are a rising wit, and she is at the top. So at her, Burney!—at her, and down with her!’

He had, it seems, put her out of countenance when she had last dined there, out of wanton savageness; but promised now not to contradict her as he did then, unless she provoked him again. Yet he acknowledged that she diffused more ‘knowledge in her conversation than almost any woman he knew—he might almost say, any man;’ to which Mrs. Thrale added that she knew no man equal to her except the doctor, and Burke. Nevertheless, after a time—

‘Come, Burney,’ he resumed, ‘shall you and I study our parts against Mrs. Montagu comes?’

‘I think,’ said Mrs. Thrale, ‘you should begin with Miss Gregory, and down with her first.’

‘No, no!’ cried the doctor, ‘always fly at the eagle—down with Mrs. Montagu herself. I hope she will come full of “Evelina.”’ They could not, however, prevail on Dr. Johnson to stay for this encounter. Early in the day, Mrs. Montagu arrived, accompanied by Miss Gregory, a fine-looking young woman. Miss Burney's description of Mrs. Montagu, about the age of sixty, corresponds tolerably with that of others who knew her intimately. She was thin and spare, and looked younger than she really was, from that circumstance. Every line of her face showed intelligence; but her eyes had in them an expression of severity and sarcasm which was not attractive. She was very cheerful, with a great flow of words, but apt to become dictatorial and sententious. It is said that this manner was acquired; and indeed one can hardly reconcile in this stilted uncompromising woman, the merry, discursive Elizabeth Robinson of former days. Neither was her voice musical, nor her whole style feminine; and whilst what she said was excellent, it failed, on that account, to charm, though it might often convince.

Then, as she advanced in years, her style of dress by no means suited the decline of her brilliant life. Even when approaching fourscore, she could not relinquish her diamonds and her bows, which formed, of an evening, the perpetual ornament of her emaciated person. Wraxall, who is only equalled in ill nature by Miss Burney, thought that these glittering appendages of opulence were used to dazzle those whom her literary reputation failed to astound: but they were probably merely the adornments which the habit of using them had rendered almost essential.

Notwithstanding these imperfections, to be invited to Montagu House was the aim of all rising literati. Mrs. Montagu was the Madame du Deffand of London; and her fame as the Queen of Society rested not only on her intellect, her Essay on Shakspeare, her conversational talents, but also on the solid basis of her being the best dinner-giver in London. Sometimes, however, her parties failed: witness the meeting of the Bishop of Chester and Mrs. Thrale, when the bishop waited for Mrs. Thrale to begin speaking, and Mrs. Thrale waited for the bishop, and Mrs. Montagu harangued away, ‘caring not one fig who spoke, as long as she could herself be listened to.’ Not to be welcomed to Hill Street, which was an abode of much elegance, or to Mrs. Montagu's new house in Portman Square, would have made the great critic himself miserable. Even at a certain dreaded dinner at Streatham, into which Miss Burney walked with a company step, Johnson could not help asking, in a jocose manner, if he should be invited to see it. And when Mrs. Montagu asked them all to a house-warming, fixing Easter-day for their visit, a general emotion of pleasure ran through the party. There was about the close of the eighteenth century so great a change in costume, that the ancient lady in her diamonds and her knots of ribbon must have looked almost like an inhabitant of another period. As Mrs. Montagu came forth in all this finery, she mingled with a fashionable throng who, after the year 1794, were wholly changed in dress and style. Her youth and middle age had been passed with those who in private life wore the costume which is now confined to the levée or drawing-room, but which was then assumed everywhere and every day. Fox and his clique, affecting a contempt for dress, although formerly coxcombs of the greatest pretensions, first threw a discredit on it; and these new ideas passed from the House of Commons to the clubs, from the clubs to the private assemblies of the capital. Dress was in a sort of atrophy, and Jacobinism gave it its death blow. Pantaloons, cropped hair, shoe-strings, came into use. Ruffles and buckles went out with powder, and etiquette, in a form, was also vanishing by degrees. Such were the men: whilst the ladies, casting off their tresses, laying aside their cushions and their curls, their lappets and ribbons, had their locks cut round à la victime, as if ready for the stroke of the guillotine.

To carry out the Republican frenzy, the Grecian style was adopted; short waists, sleeves fastened by a button; tight skirts; a drapery suited to the climates of Rome and Greece, but almost death in our foggy atmosphere; and thus distinctions began to be levelled in this country. It was, perhaps, to repel this innovation that the ‘queen of the blues’ was still seen blazing in diamonds—a mark for the ridicule of those who lived in new lights, as the doctrines of revolutionized France were then considered among a certain set or party in the great world.

Another enemy of Mrs. Montagu's was Richard Cumberland, a ‘Sir Fretful Plagiary,’ who could endure no one's works but his own. The Observer, of which he was the editor and chief contributor, was full of personalities; and he attacked Mrs. Montagu, under the name of ‘Vanessa,’ with much acrimony.

The Blue-stocking assemblies, as they were styled, remained in their perfection fifteen years, from 1770 to 1785; but declined after the death of Dr. Johnson, who had formed around him a circle that was then broken up. Horace Walpole was after that period devoured by the gout: Sir Joshua Reynolds could not, from his deafness, contribute to conversation. Mrs. Chapone, who, though a woman of great knowledge, had one of the most repulsive exteriors ever seen, was not calculated, any more than her letters, to enliven. Burke sometimes hovered for a short time in Portman Square, but was absorbed in politics, and soon disappeared. Erskine, then a rising barrister, and like many such of his own time and ours, involved in debt, sometimes enchanted the lingerers in what was now comparatively a desert, by his vivacity and versatility of talent. Sir William Pepys, Topham Beauclerk, and Bennet Langton were still there, and still welcomed. Hume and Adam Smith, as well as Robertson, lived in Edinburgh, and Gibbon never affected ‘the blues;’ and it is indeed probable that neither he nor Hume nor Smith would have been received by a society so averse to their doctrines and their publications.

To Mrs. Montagu is wholly due the origin of the literary society of the metropolis. It is indeed highly probable that she imbibed her notions of social and intellectual intercourse from the many foreigners expatriated here. The first literary meetings are said to have been held by Hortensia Mancini, niece to Cardinal Mazarin, who assembled in her apartments men of letters, among whom St. Evremond and De Grammont figured.

But no Englishwoman ever succeeded so completely in drawing men from the clubs, and women from the faro-table or quadrille, to the disquisition of literature and science, so thoroughly as Mrs. Montagu.

She is remembered chiefly for this service done to Society; in which, as she had no predecessors, she may be said to have had few successors to be compared to her. As a writer she was respectable; her Essay on Shakspeare was praised by Beattie, who has pronounced it the most elegant piece of criticism in our language or in any other.

Her letters have been also highly eulogized. Ten years after her death they were given to the world, and later the correspondence of her matured years was added to her earlier epistles. These last have, we think, a peculiar charm. Models of pure English as they are, they are easy, sparkling, and sensible. No young person can read them without deriving advantage; without an increased desire for improvement; without finding the sympathies of the heart go along with the advancement of the intellect; and it is a satisfaction to know that she who penned those letters, not only thought wisely, but acted well; and living in the world, rose above its follies and meannesses with the aid of faith. To say that she had her weaknesses is but to say that she was mortal: that she had great benevolence, enlarged views, tender feelings for the unhappy, a sincere reverence, above all things, for virtue, is but justice rendered to the merits of Elizabeth Montagu.