[In the following essay, Blunt describes the importance of Montagu and her letters, including how they shaped her persona and what her letters reveal about her character.]

On the death of any of her particular friends, and also of the great folk of her day, such as Lord Bath, Lord Chatham, Lady Hervey, Lord Lyttelton, Lord Chesterfield, her cousin the Primate, and many others, it was, as we have seen, Mrs. Montagu's custom to set down in her letters her summary view of their characters, as she had seen them.

If her precept and example are to be followed, her own turn for such an analysis has now arrived. When one has spent many months in reading and arranging the letters of a woman who for half a century maintained a steady correspondence, into which she put much that was typical of her character and thoughts and interests, one expects, yet sometimes fails, to reach an acquaintance that is almost intimate, and to visualise a complete personality from the various aspects revealed to different correspondents. To her sister, Mrs. Scott, Mrs. Montagu confided all sorts of personalities and domesticities, including a great deal about her health and ailments, and some delicious little explosions about her husband, when “His Honour” was particularly annoying and troublesome. To Mrs. Carter went most of her literary talk; to Mrs. Vesey, the beloved “Sylph,” her social and blue-stocking chit-chat; to Lord Bath her affectionate homage and concern; to Lord Lyttelton her critical cogitations; and to Dr. Monsey her wit and her fun.

The amount and variety of her correspondence must have been, for the times, “prodigious.” “In the course of two posts,” we find her writing to Mr. Pepys, “I had letters from a Polish Prince, a great dealer in cattle, one of the most distinguished of our litterati, my Northern Steward, a great Scotch Philosopher, my head carpenter in Portman Square, the sweet Minstrel Dr. Beattie, an artist at Birmingham, my Bailiff at Sandleford and many characters between these extremes.”

And though her health was anything but robust, her eyesight gradually weakening, and her doctors perpetually warning her that the stooping attitude at her writing-table was particularly bad for the ailments which so often afflicted her, every letter seems to have got its answer, and in no stinting or perfunctory measure.

A collection of letters such as this is indeed a severe, perhaps even rather an unfair test of personality. The repetition of phrases and jeux d'esprit, which is perfectly legitimate in letters addressed to different people, becomes tiresome when they are recollected; varying descriptions of the same event to different people may arouse criticism, though they can generally be justified; while the lengthy formulae of compliment and condolence which were an inevitable part of the convenance of the times, in bulk sometimes become intolerably irksome.

Sententious undoubtedly these letters often are, but not, I think, in the derogatory implication, when allowance is made for their period. I am convinced they were never laboured; neither their style nor diction has any smell of the lamp; they flowed naturally and easily from a well-stored brain and a well-used goose quill. Readers of these pages must form their own judgement of their subject, to which the few following extracts may in some respects help them. They have doubtless smiled over occasional foibles and pedantries; they may criticise this and disagree with that. But I shall be surprised if they do not in the end admit that here was a very notable woman of her time; a woman who as a girl accounted the graceful dancing of a minuet as more important than the knowledge of a foreign tongue, yet who had both accomplishments, and could drive a dozen miles to a ball, dance half the night, get upset in the mud on the way home, laugh hugely at the joke of it all, and then spend a day in reading Horace or making a Herbal; who could conduct a Salon in Portman Square, a farm in Berkshire, and a colliery in Northumberland with equal success; who was equally at home at a queen's drawing-room or a pitman's dinner; who, with great common sense, had occasional flashes of that inspired unreason that transcends common sense; who enjoyed her wealth because she knew how to use it well; who realised how largely virtue is a question of temperament, and with all her sound morality had a tender consideration for human frailties; who did “all things with a grace and most things with ease”; whose tender solicitude in the ills of others gave her constant hours of anxiety and distress; and who was capable of enlarging on her own faults, laughing at her foibles, and attributing her virtue to lack of temptation.

In trying to sum up the personality of Elizabeth Montagu, it is a little difficult to hit the appropriate adjectives. That she was staunch in friendship, widely beneficent in charity, clear-headed in business, and very sound as a rule in critical judgement, will probably be granted readily by most of those who read these pages. That hers was a lovable personality would be too much to claim. Individually (but this is merely a first personal matter), after having lived with her more or less uninterruptedly for more than a year, I may admit that, having begun my task with a feeling so unsympathetic that I doubted whether I should ever have undertaken the bequest, she has reduced me to a half-reluctant fondness which it might be difficult to justify. She had neither the warmth nor the emotions which are generally implied in that highest tribute. Yet the woman who could inspire and retain the strong affection of men so diverse as Beattie, Gilbert West, Dr. Gregory, Lord Kames, Lord Bath, and Lord Lyttelton, and of women as different as Mrs. Carter and Mrs. Vesey, must have had much, beyond intellect, that was attractive. It is a pity that the word “respectable” has fallen on degenerate days. With Mrs. Montagu it connoted real esteem, and was reserved for the friends she thought most highly of and the personages she most revered. To Johnson the word meant venerable and worthy of regard and of honour; and in that best sense I think it may fairly be used about herself.

Two clever men, indeed, who knew Mrs. Montagu personally, though by no means intimately, have left on record impressions of her, the one in terms of embittered animosity, the other in phrases of rather peevish criticism.

Alexander Carlyle, writing of her visit to Edinburgh, says that she did not take there, as she despised the women and disgusted the men with her affectation; that she was greedy of more praise than she was entitled to; that she was remarkably deficient in genuine feeling, and so on. Old Edinburgh was no place for the success of impostures. … “In Newcastle, where there was no audience for such an actress as she was, her natural character was displayed, which was that of an active manager of her affairs, a crafty chaperone and a keen pursuer of her interest, not to be outdone by the sharpest coal dealer on Tyne; but in this capacity she was not displeasing, for she was not acting a part.”

Sir Nathaniel Wraxall,—whilst admitting that she had great natural cheerfulness and a flow of animal spirits, loved to talk, and talked well on almost every subject,—makes much of her want of taste in continuing to wear her diamonds when she was an old woman, says that her manner was dictatorial and sententious, and that there was nothing feminine about her, except an attention to dress and the toilet unsuited to a woman professing a philosophic mind.

Whilst contemporary criticisms such as these, which have undoubtedly weighed much in the biographical verdict on Mrs. Montagu's character, must be faced rather than evaded, their answer may now be left to the readers of these pages, who will recognise the germ of truth, whilst feeling its unfair exaggeration, and its distance from the whole truth. Jupiter Carlyle only saw Mrs. Montagu when, as he says, Dr. Gregory was “showing her off” to the Edinburgh literati; and it was just on those occasions, when she felt she must “flash,” that she was least attractive and most unamiable, if she could only have been brought to believe it. Wraxall knew her better, and indeed ends by admitting “it would be ungrateful in me not to acknowledge the gratification derived from the conversation and intercourse of such a society as hers”; but both his memoirs and Carlyle's suffer from their being recollections penned long subsequently to the events referred to, and tinged by later hearsay and comment. He speaks, for example, of Mrs. Montagu's having visited Paris in 1763, and her eagerness to recount stories of her sumptuous repasts there, and the astonishment of the French literati over her lavish entertainments. But Mrs. Montagu never went near Paris in 1763, or till thirteen years later. And if an old lady has fine jewels, is it so very heinous a crime that she should like to wear them? But, as a matter of fact, Mrs. Montagu gave most of hers to Matthew's bride on their marriage in 1785, when she was not an old woman, and, so far as references go, before her acquaintance with Mr. Wraxall began. On the other hand, men like Lord Bath, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Beattie, Lord Lyttelton, and others who knew her much more intimately, sang her praises, as we have already seen, in terms that must seem to us excessive. Such extremes of adulation and abuse from contemporaries make the task of the later biographer a little puzzling. There seems no necessity for either superlative; but that is not to imply that Elizabeth Montagu was either a nonentity or a mediocrity of her times. On the contrary, whilst it was her masculine self-assertion that annoyed her detractors, it was just her strength of character, her bold judgement, her unswerving common sense that delighted her friends. In a sense it may perhaps be said that it was a varying manifestation of the same qualities that attracted some and repelled others.

The same remark, indeed, may be applied to her personality, of which one finds contemporary records that vary greatly, though it is generally agreed that as a girl she was beautiful; and the portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds, reproduced as frontispiece to the first volume, shows a face of great interest and distinction. Whilst one critic notes that her eyes, as she grew old, were apt to take on a look of severity and sarcasm, another writes: “Her beauty was most admired in the peculiar animation and expression of her blue eyes, with high-arched dark eyebrows, and in the contrast of her brilliant complexion with her dark brown hair. She was of middle stature, and stooped a little, which gave an air of modesty to her countenance.”

As a letter-writer, though Dr. Young, Gilbert West, Lord Chatham, David Garrick, Beattie, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Burke, and others of her correspondents expressed high admiration of her epistolary gifts, and Wraxall spoke of her as the Madame du Deffand of the English capital, it is quite unnecessary, and would do her no good service to-day, to place her in competition with the great names of her time in this category—with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, or Lord Chesterfield, or Horace Walpole, for instance. Her “grey goose quill” was a wonderful traveller, and hard worn enough; but it was plucked from a Sandleford farmyard bird, sound, sagacious, capitoline, but pedestrian; incapable of winged words or wild-fowl flights. Yet the slower-paced home-bred style has its compensations. Fascinating as Walpole's letters are, the acrid cynicism which pervades so much of them palls at times, and the reader welcomes with a sense of actual relief some rare sentence of honest praise or genuine feeling. It is so very much easier to scoff than to praise, to disparage than to appreciate, to doubt than to believe. Elizabeth Montagu held on bravely to the standard of her beliefs, the demands of her doctrine, and the faith of her friendships. If the grey goose quill ran away with her at times, it never really imagined itself the eagle's pinion that her friends were always protesting it to be.

By way of helping himself to visualise a personality which he has found by no means so simple of definition as the critics who have been content to dismiss it in a few petulant and ill-informed sentences, the editor has extracted here and there on his pilgrimage through Mrs. Montagu's letters a few of those reflections in which they sometimes too profusely abound, which may well be gathered here and may serve to make her write part at least of her own character and way of looking at life.

Here, then, are a few random selections, grouped under typical headings. Each paragraph is from a separate letter.

TEMPERAMENT

If I could hope that any part of my life was such as I could venture to present before the great Giver it would make me very happy. But, alas! at the end of every day I am conscious, that I am a most unprofitable Servant. The relieving distressed objects, only as far as is consistent with enjoying all reasonable indulgences of ones inclination, cannot have any merit. It is merely following a good instinct. The discharge of painful duties has merit; the struggling with strong passions and subduing them is also meritorious, resisting temptations and unlawful pleasures extreamly so; but my natural disposition, and the turn of my education and situation in life have made all these things easy, so that while I am towards the World calld a virtuous person, I am void of merit in the eye of him who knows me, and who gave me a temperament so little liable to violent transgressions.

I know nothing bad of the lady you ask after but what has arisen originally from the weakness of flesh and blood. The sins which grow on the animal part of a human creature are more pardonable than those which spring from the mind; this is a virtuous confession for me, who never was prone to any but spiritual sins; and am in body a Saint, in mind a great Sinner.

GIRLHOOD

She is a fine girl; but I dont love girls, especially boarding school misses, who are all over affectation, so that I take no very great delight in my nieces company. It grieves me to see the absurd education given to girls at boarding schools, they are to speak and move by art, a coxcomb of a dancing master, and a fool of a governess are to fashion a girl. By such guides Nature is thrown out of her way, and grimaces are taught which would deform a monkey, and a style of conversation that would disgrace a parrot, and for such teaching parents pay a great price. The simplicity of manners natural to youth is a charm and never to be parted with but from a long intercourse with the world, which while it destroys one kind of merit establishes another, and substitutes an artificial ease in lieu of the original simplicity.

MATRIMONY

I own it astonishes me when I hear two people voluntarily, and on their own suggestion, entering into a bargain for perhaps fifty years cohabitation. I am so much of Solomons mind that the end of a feast is better than the beginning of a fray, that I weep more at a wedding than a funeral …, I desire my congratulations to your family on the wedding. Marriage is honourable in all, and I have an infinite respect for it, and would by no means be thought to make a jest of so serious a thing. It is a civil debt which all people ought to pay.

I have told our friend Black, that the more sickly he is, the more he wants a tender friend to nurse him. I think most Women make good Nurses, few perhaps very eligible Companions. I always advise as many of my female friends as are indiscreet, and as many of my Male friends as are sickly, to marry; for the first want a Master, and the second a Nurse, and these are characters generally to be found in the holy state of Matrimony; the rest is precarious.

My Father very obligingly and kindly sent us a Haunch of Venison yesterday, remembering that Mr. Montagu loved Venison; with the haunch he wrote a very droll letter, well describing the woefull case of Mr. William in Labour of a Law suit. I have enclosed the letter, but pray dont lose it, for I will keep it as a proof, that a jolly witty Father may have a very simple snivelling kind of a Son. I wrote Mr. William a peppering epistle about his dolours, but without effect. Think of a great lubberly fellow aged 36 or some such matter, and worth about £12000 in money, in preferment between 6 and 700 a year, crying and blubbering least he shd not get five thousand more than he has already. I pity his poor Wife, to be obliged to love honour and obey such a dish of skimmed milk. I shd, I own, less dislike your tory, rory, buck, blood, and mohock or what not for my Lord and Master than such a Gentleman-like kind of man.

By her neatness of apparel and decorum of conduct I perceive she is predestinated to live and dye in single blessedness, tho I think she too is of opinion that earthlier happier is the rose distilled than that which withers on the virgin thorn. I always imagine a serious formal nymph who between 30 and 40 grows a little precise, intends by honorable means to enter into the honorable state of wedlock: they no longer address to the passions by kind-glances and engaging smiles, but prudently apply to the reason by showing they could make a sensible man a good wife; now and then it succeeds, and a cautious man marries a prude with a sang froid that is very respectable.

Your Virgin mind does Mr. Vesey, I fear, unmerited honour, by supposing he wishes to make reparation to his Wife, for the uneasiness his delay'd return has given her. Husbands are never in the wrong. I have heard that a Confessor comforted an expiring Monarch, who wish'd he could make reparation for injuries he had done, by assuring agonizing Majesty that as he had absolute power over the lives and fortunes of his Subjects, he would not have done any injustice, and so could not have any restitution to make; tho' absolute Monarch then felt strongly he was not ague proof, he accepted the consolation and said, c'est vrai. If a moment of penitence should happen to Mr. Vesey; Mr. P. will assure him Husbands cannot do wrong and he will say “'tis true.”

SOCIETY

I am going to night to a great Assembly at Northumb^d House. I was at the Opera on saturday night, I am to be at Egremont House and then at Almacks on thursday night. I think Miss Jenny Wrongheads account of her week was not better than mine, but if one is to live amidst the Townlys and the Modishes they are best in a blaze of waxlights; there is no enduring the fine World but in its own fine Way. Tomorrow evening I shall enjoy a sober interval with a book.

I am loth to retire entirely from the World, and yet I am unable to endure perpetual society. If I contract my circle, still it is the same fatigue, nor is it pleasant to live quietly with those who are in a bustle. There is nothing but being in a whirl that can make one take pleasure in whirling animals. If one was quiet and stationary one should give a fixed attention which would never be repaid. To be quiet and retired in this age, would be as bad as being sober in drunken company. …

To speak sincerely, I think no society compleatly agreable if entirely male or female. The masculinisms of men, and the feminalistics of the women, if the first prevail they make conversation too rough, and austere, if the latter, too soft and weak. Discourse led entirely by men is generally pedantick or political.

GOOD COMPANY

I am sorry my Father is to leave Bath so soon, as I think the airings must be of service to your health, and it is pleasant to have a companion who enters with the enthusiasm of taste into the beauties of those scenes one is to behold. There is perhaps not a more direct way to please than that of appearing pleased. Many persons are insipid from insensibility, others make themselves intolerable by a kind of fastidious delicacy; it is in the power of anyone of this character to impart discontent to a whole company. I have sometimes been diverted to see a party disconcerted they know not why, by one person in it finding little faults in some things, vigourously examining whatever appeared agreable, reasoning when they should admire, and criticizing when they shd commend. The good precept of nothing too much is necessary in conversation as well as in active life, for too much taste, too much knowledge, too much witt, is not always usefull to be exerted. Much of ones pleasure in seeing a fine Country depends on the sympathy of ones companion, and nothing is so provoking as a gloom or mist thrown over a fine prospect by the very person whom one has chosen to accompany one to it. My Father is much in the right to keep up in his mind a desire and an endeavour to be pleased. Age is too apt to cool the mind as to all distant objects, and it is not unusual, to see persons of his time of life so concenter'd in themselves, that their parlour fire, their dinner, their supper makes to them the whole of the World, they are as anxious about these little matters as if their views comprehended the largest system, and their utmost prosperity cannot afford much content.

Solitude is delightfull when one has been wearied with too much Society. Society in its turn will be agreable when one is tired of solitude. Motley is the only wear, for all the fools in this World who design to be merry in it. If I did not know any more of myself than what I have experienced since I came to Sandleford this summer, I should be of Mr. Robinsons opinion; but I know the leopard does not change its spots, and I have as motly, and as variegated a fancy as any Creature whatever. I believe by November, tho all the stars should be twinkling in the blue Firmament, I shall be wishing my great Room was finished and the Lustres glittering in it, and myself sitting in the Center, Beaux esprits on one hand, fine Gentlemen and fine Ladies (without any esprit at all) on the other, feathered nymphs, and great buckle Maccaronies circulating about. I still abide by those lines of Fontaine which you may remember I was fond of in my youth,

Ville, Campagne, enfin il n'est rien
          Qui ne m'est souverain bien.

I rejoyce to find that I do not fall into the common misfortune of growing more wise and less happy by growing older; I think my spirits were not so gay at fifteen as they have been ever since I came to Sandleford.

SERVANTS

So far therefore as your Servants are the engines and machines of your domestick economy, you will soon give to the new the same movements, and teach them to proceed in the same direction as their Predecessors, but as every humane mind becomes attach'd to a fellow creature who has long served, you will certainly find the change painful. I remember when Susan left me, to go with her Husband to the establishment in the North which I had provided for her I sat sullen and pouting by the fire an hour beyond my usual bedtime, because Susan was not present to unbuckle my shoes, and now White seems to me the only Person in the World worthy to perform the office. Servants administer so much to the convenience and comforts of our lives, that I believe they have a considerable share of every worthy Masters good will. Wherever it is otherwise, I suspect him to be their Dupe or their Tyrant.

OLD AGE

I am very willing to adopt your opinions of the comforts of old age, to those who have not arrived at that period in the exercise of violent passions, or frivolous affections; but the loss of many friends, or the coldness found in most who remain, throws a great damp upon the mind.

The intercourse of friendship in youth, is zealous, warm, tender, and officious, and the source therefore of great delight. Between old people it is generally carried on in a manner perfectly the reverse, and tho it is still a treasure, it is like money in a bankers hands, you may draw for it when you please, but it does not pay constant interest; on extraordinary occasions it is a sure resource, but is rather a consolation in time of affliction than of much effect on ordinary occasions.

At our age we cannot make new Friends, and at our age many have been taken from us. Tho my temper is naturally chearful, yet I often walk about as if this World was one great Churchyard, at every step I strike against the tombstone of a departed friend or fear to stumble into a grave preparing for one yet remaining. It spoils the harmony of a Concert that I often recollect, that some Friend with whom I once used to share in this amusement, and had a quiet relish for it, is gone for ever from me, others who had given brilliancy to every assembly appear no more; even in rational Society, where sensible conversation prevails, I miss some voices which used to bear the best, the sweetest, and the wisest part. These circumstances make me often look with disgust on the Cards of Invitation on my chimney peice, and these circumstances make me fond of the Country, where Spring restores what Winter took away: and here too I have another advantage, by means of an ample fortune I can administer to the comfort and happiness of many. Their woes and wants are not metaphysical, a little money carefully managed and skilfully applied will do a great deal towards promoting the happiness of a Country Neighbourhood, it is well if it does not do as much harm where you cannot personally know the characters and situations of those to whom you give.

I found a letter in Hill street from Lady Harriot at my return to England which gave a very indifferent account of the Archbishops health. My first acquaintance with him began when I was only six years old, and it has pass'd through various seasons of life with the degree of friendship suitable to them, and now I lose my friend when a friend is most valued; young people love many people, very old people love no one; in the midst of le bruit de la jeunesse, or the dead calm, and silenced affections of old age, the loss of a Friend is less perceived. I have however the satisfaction to know he will leave a good example, and a good name.

I look upon it as one of the best rewards of a blameless life, to be able in ones old age to give Countenance and protection to deserving young Persons; the good one imparts to them is strongly reflected back again. Through my little Nephew and my fair Gregory, I enjoy a thousand little pleasures, that I could no longer taste in my own Person. As one has a tenacious love of this present life, this present World, it seems to me as politick to form attachments to the fate and fortunes of young Persons, as to ensure ones ticket in a Lottery. While theirs is in the Wheel, I think myself interested, tho my own should be a blank. I know it is a common opinion, that young Persons are never affectionately attach'd to old ones, but I am convinced that they are capable of a tender esteem for Persons in years, but certainly esteem must be the foundation of their affection. Caprice, and peevishness and austerity, will disgust them. It behoves one as one loses ones Agremens, to part with those caprices which the amabilities of youth render'd tolerable and its inexperience excusable. It has often provoked me, to see an old Beldame expect the young people about her, to love her in spite of whims and humours, one could not have endured in the beautiful Lady Coventry. Old folks are usually a bundle of disagreable humours, without any mixture of what makes the various compound Man a tolerable animal. Why should the wrinkled brow, the lack lustre eye, the grey hairs assume what would not be allowd to the ivory forehead, love darting eyes, and tresses like the Morn? But I have moralized in this subject as if the garrulity if not the peevishness of old age had overtaken me.

These pages have dealt only with Elizabeth Montagu's years of maturity and advancing age; they form the sequel to the story of her girlhood and earlier married life in Mrs. Climenson's volumes. The “Fidget” of 1740, the disdainful young beauty whose impertinent satire, flippant irony, and sportive vanity were so severely criticised by Fanny Burney's “Daddy” Crisp, had, long ere the date of their opening, put away childish things, and had shown that behind and beyond them she possessed qualities, steadfast strength of will, reasoned deliberation, potent common sense, which were not marred by and which ultimately subdued the vanities and conceits which the friendships of her youth had fostered. The greatest fault in her character was neither her vanity nor her ostentatiousness nor her affectations, though of all these she was and could be justly accused; but, as the Burney rightly divined, her lack of that don d'aimer which so transfigures life, and in which Fanny's admired Mrs. Thrale so contrastingly excelled. Mrs. Montagu was, as Hester Chapone remarked to Mrs. Carter, “an ignoramus in love.” From a few guarded sentences of half-suppressed yet poignant emotion, one might imagine that, had her little son lived, the lacking gift might have been evolved and the void filled through him. But that was not to be. And when the news of the death of the charming young James Macdonald came from Frascati, Mrs. Vesey—who perhaps knew Mrs. Montagu as intimately as any one—wrote to her: “All my ideas of pleasure are sunk at once in knowing what you must feel in losing one who was such an ornament to your society, and perhaps had endeared himself to your friendship, by his esteem, admiration, and his confidence in you; there is such a charm in the attachments of youth, especially when it is adorned with every virtue and accomplishment.” That attachment, too, was nipped by an untimely death in 1766; and there is no evidence of any later warmth. The whole incident of Dorothea Alison's marriage, and her treatment of the girl whose heart she had once declared “one perfect chrysolite, no flaw, no imperfection in it,” seems to reveal a cold, matter-of-fact logic to which sentiment or passion were repugnant strangers. Of all extremes, indeed, whether in politics, love, or philanthropy, she had an inherent distrust. “Virtue,” she once wrote, “wisdom, honours, prosperity, happiness are all to be found on the turnpike road or not to be found at all.” And an illuminating sentence in her criticism of Mrs. Thrale's second marriage will be recalled: “Whoever possesses the blessing of sound understanding never is guilty of absurd conduct, or does anything which the world calls strange.” It is this passionless level of unswerving common sense, this steadfastness to the middle of the road, this subnormal temperature of mind which has made finer characters unsympathetic.

Mrs. Montagu once wrote to Mrs. Donnellan in her earlier years: “I am sorry to say the generality of women who have excelled in wit have failed in chastity.” To that sweeping dictum she was herself a conspicuous exception; but behind its exaggeration lies a converse truth not altogether inapposite. Putting wit aside, she would have been a more lovable woman if she had not set so stern a watch upon her heart, and lived with a finger on her pulse; if she had been less self-possessed and more unguarded.

But if this must be said, it must also be said that she lived and learnt; that one finds progress, development, advance in tolerance, in humanity, in self-perception, in sympathy, as her life went on; and that when her adopted Matthew brought a wife to Sandleford, and children filled its rooms and gardens with life and laughter, her closing years were warmed by the happiness of real affection. Of her instant and anxious sympathy in all the illness and distresses of her friends the letters give ample testimony; Sterne, Lord Bath, Beattie, Lord Lyttelton, Woodhouse, Mrs. Vesey, and a host of others bore witness to her tender solicitude and concern, quick in activity and practical in means. Much as in some respects she was her father's daughter, in this aspect they were worlds apart. His humour, wit, and cool comprehension of his world she largely inherited; and her ability to laugh at herself and her own foibles and failings is refreshing and delightful. Her just appreciation of Falstaff's charm; her chaff of Mrs. Carter; her laughing letters from Spa; her criticisms of the pompous Gray, the infatuated Hanway, the amazing Chudleigh; her love of Monsey's foolery; her appreciation of Tristram and of his fretful spouse; her efforts to evoke the best out of Tom Lyttelton; her love of the adventurous Emin; all these things have been touched on, and are good to remember. Indeed she was an admirable friend, as her intercourse with the first Lord Lyttelton and with Beattie, with Mrs. Carter and the Sylph, and Mrs. Garrick and Hannah More, and many others abundantly proves; and the claim that she had ever been “fond to spread friendships and to cover heats” is largely justified.

Egerton Brydges wrote of her: “She was good-natured, generous, candid and obliging; no one knew characters better; she saw a foible in an instant, but she generally forbore to expose it. She was acquainted with all the great literary men of her day, and her house was open to them. She had the talent of drawing the characters of those whom she knew.”

Her charities and acts of benevolence have been sufficiently referred to in the body of this work; and there can be no question that, though often rigid in her justice, she was generously munificent to a very large number of people. Boswell, who, “drunk or sober,” had no love for her, once suggested that her generosity was mere vanity; but Dr. Johnson—who often resented the abuse by others of those whom he occasionally abused himself—at once retorted, “I have seen no beings who do so much good from benevolence as she does from whatever motive.”

Of her business ability as a farmer and colliery owner, lack of space has unfortunately prevented inclusion of the evidence; and this is the more regrettable because M. Huchon, in his admirable little Essay, has referred rather slightingly to her condescending patronage of her pitmen and workers. Due allowance being made for the developments of a century and a half in the attitude of capital and labour, the letters in this collection do not warrant any such estimate. Mrs. Montagu's farm and colliery methods might possibly shock some of our economic pundits and trades union enthusiasts; but according to her generation and its lights she was a very beneficent as well as successful proprietor; she had less trouble with her men than any of the adjoining owners, and indeed there were pilgrims to Denton to study its management. She fatted hogs to provide bacon for her poor at a very low price; she brewed them small beer in large quantities, because “water, when they work hard, is poor potation.” She laid out very large sums in houses, fencing, drainage, and improvements; she employed many of her women in making clothes for the more needy; she grew acres of potatoes for the benefit of her tenantry; she established boys' schools, and had the girls taught needlework. If she occasionally celebrated a coal winning or an anniversary with largess and a feast that did not end quite soberly, if the beer was not always “small,” and Wear the publican was sometimes sent as Ganimede with vessels of punch, “Madam” at any rate went to every table of the feast to drink their healths; and then established good Mr. Raikes' Sunday Schools at Newbury to teach the rising generation a better way.

By way of hors-d'œuvre, before the substantial meal of an eighteenth-century memoir, one would do well to read Gay's Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets. Though it dates back to 1716, its picture of London held good in most respects till nearly the end of the century, and it may be taken as laying the scene of Mrs. Montagu's married life in town very graphically and not unfaithfully. One needs to try and visualise her surroundings if one is to do her justice; to picture the narrow streets and overhanging houses, the shop fronts bulging over the narrow, cobbled, post-guarded footways, with creaking signboards overhead, and wares of all kinds hung and strewn outside; the filthy kennels, deep in reeking mud; the rough roadway pitted with holes, where shouting hackney-coachmen, jostling chairmen, and insolent footmen thrust their way through, scattering mud and dust on luckless pedestrians; the miserable glimmer of dripping oil lamps at night, when thieves and footpads roamed at large and at ease, the only protection for wayfaring honest folk being a few decrepit old watchmen encumbered with immense coats, lanthorns, rattles, and long poles. Refuse thrown out from upper windows, waterspouts from the roof fronts, stenches from the uncleansed open sewers, derelict houses where lean swine and scavenger dogs forgathered, till they fell with a crash on ill-fated passers-by;—these were but a tithe of the perils of the Londoner of those “good old times.” And within doors, too, we who dwell in the days of electric light and of bathrooms, of lifts and water supply, of gas cookery and telephones, of hourly posts and evening papers, have much to divest ourselves of before we can live back to George the Third. It was not only a hard-drinking, hard-swearing, hard-gambling age; it was in many typical aspects a hard-hearted, an arrogant, an unsympathetic age. The very welcome that was given to The Sentimental Journey but serves to show on what parched and thirsty ground Sterne's manna fell. These things must in all fairness be held in constant memory whilst we pass judgement on a life that, being pre-eminently social, was proportionately trammelled by the conditions of its environment.

Mrs. Montagu's literary work has been sufficiently dealt with in the record of the publication of her Shakespeare Essay, and of her intercourse with Dr. Johnson. Creditable as it was, it is of course rather upon her development of the social coterie amongst the lettered leaders of her time than upon her own writings that her fame in this direction rests; and of these, and of the difficulties and counter-attractions with which they were faced, enough has been recorded to permit of some judgement being formed. Whatever their imperfections and shortcomings, the Blue Stockings, of whom Mrs. Montagu was the acknowledged head and forefront, did, as it will generally be conceded, provide a solution of what was a real need of their time. They brought men and women together in rational intellectual intercourse; they provided an alternative to the hard drinking and deep gambling of the Clubs; and they established the claim of well-educated women to a share of scholarly and literary converse.

In taking leave—as we must, and briefly now—of Elizabeth Montagu, perhaps one might fairly say that the more attractive facets of her character were those which flashed most rarely, yet which one felt were there; not her learning, though that was wide and well founded; not her critical faculty, though that was often shrewd and sometimes admirable; not her wit, though that, at best, was pretty enough; but rather, after all, her tolerant comprehension of human frailties; her frank recognition of her own vanities and weaknesses; her swift and active sympathies in the illness or misfortune of those she cared for; her devotion—never forgotten though so seldom uttered—for the little one she had loved so greatly and lost so soon.