SOURCE: Jones, W. Powell. “The Romantic Bluestocking, Elizabeth Montagu.” Huntington Library Quarterly 12, no. 1 (1949): 85-98.

[In the following essay, Jones discusses the importance of Montagu's letters and what they reveal about her. He also examines several unpublished pieces of correspondence in terms of the literary theory contained therein, focusing especially on the eighteenth century conception of romanticism.]

I

Elizabeth Robinson Montagu, “Queen of the Bluestockings,” is perhaps the most famous of those learned ladies of eighteenth-century England who courted literary circles, collected celebrities, and strove to be known as people of learning. Because of her social connections, her wealth, and the publication in 1769 of her Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare, she was better known than her fellow “bluestockings,” Mrs. Carter, Mrs. Vesey, and Mrs. Chapone, with all of whom she was intimately acquainted. The celebrities of the day, even Dr. Johnson, came to her exotic “Chinese room” in the Hill Street house. After 1782 they flocked even more eagerly to her new London house in Portman Square, where in 1791 she inaugurated her famous room “with the hangings of feathers” by giving a breakfast for 700 persons.¹

It is no wonder that Elizabeth Montagu is best known for this side of her nature. The eighteenth century was a sociable age in which letters were written with fervor and preserved by admiring correspondents. Mrs. Montagu wrote numerous letters in the eighty years of her life that ended with the century in 1800. The collection in the Huntington Library contains several thousand of her letters, most of them uncatalogued, from which three successive plunderings have selected and published mainly those letters that tell of celebrities and public events. In addition, she was much talked about by the celebrities who flocked to her parties. She was more or less intimate with the Garricks and the Sternes, while people like Lord Bath and Lord Lyttelton were among her most enthusiastic correspondents and admirers.

Elizabeth Montagu was vain of her prowess as collector of celebrities, hostess extraordinary, and female savant. But there were other sides to her nature that appear only from consecutive reading of her numerous unpublished letters. In her letters to her sister, Mrs. Scott, for example, she describes intimately her domestic affairs and her ailments, and expresses in plain everyday language her hopes and fears. Other letters reveal a good picture of her times: of its social history, especially in the fields of the fine arts, travel, and medicine; of its economic history, including details of the estates and coal mines which Mrs. Montagu herself supervised; of its literature and public affairs; and of the many people to whom and about whom she wrote.²

The reasons for the neglect of this valuable source of eighteenth-century social history are tied up mainly in the history of publication from the collection that is now in the Huntington Library. At Mrs. Montagu's death in 1800, her nephew and adopted son, Matthew Montagu, later 4th Baron Rokeby, inherited his aunt's letters to Lord Bath and Lord Lyttelton. By requests to her friends still living, he was able to assemble the majority of her letters and to publish four small volumes of letters to 1761, edited with the usual changes of that period.³ Matthew's granddaughter, Emily J. Climenson, inherited the collection and from it printed two volumes with considerable commentary and family fanfare, but again with no letters beyond 1761.⁴ She worked assiduously on her material but died before she had finished a chronological arrangement of the letters. She bequeathed the collection and the task of finishing the publication to Reginald Blunt, who grudgingly took it up and in 1923 published two volumes of excerpts from the letters written after 1761.⁵ Very few letters outside this collection have turned up. One bundle of letters to her sister-in-law, Mrs. William Robinson, was used in 1873 by Dr. John Doran as the excuse for a biography of Mrs. Montagu.⁶

In recent years many scholars have dipped into the Montagu Collection at the Huntington Library, although it is still only partly catalogued. What promises to reveal more of the unpublished richness of the collection than any other publication is the forthcoming book of Professor Katherine Hornbeak, “The Other Mrs. Montagu,” which will describe and illustrate Mrs. Montagu's relations with the proletarian poets, her philanthropic and humanitarian activities, and her experiences as manager of the family coal mines in the north of England. Meanwhile, I propose, merely as an illustration of what the collection holds, to show still another side of her personality, the romantic and impressionable woman who was keenly sensitive to the newer intellectual fashions of her day. Rebecca West, in a recent sketch of Mrs. Montagu, suggests this aspect of her nature without developing it: “She had elected to live the classical life by the calm application of wisdom; her century informed her that it was proper to do so. But she was a romantic by temperament.”⁷ To show Mrs. Montagu's romantic side I have chosen from her unpublished correspondence letters on three well-known phases of the eighteenth-century “romantic”: love of the wilder aspects of nature, interest in Gothic architecture and medievil literature, and the contemplation of divine wisdom as revealed in physical nature.⁸

II

Interest in the wilder aspects of nature was not uncommon before Mason published, in 1775, Gray's enthusiastic letters on the Alps. When Mrs. Montagu crossed the Belgian hills to Spa in the summer of 1763, her enthusiasm was closely tied to the sublime in Burke and in Ossian. In a passage omitted by Blunt from her letter to Mrs. Vesey, July 14, 1763, she expresses a love of mountain storms that points toward Byron:

Our journey from Liege in respect of roads was bad enough but the unusual wildness of the Country made amends for it. On the summit of a bleak Mountain we had a violent hurricane which gave all the terror to the sublime which our friend Mr. Burke desires. As I had been reading Ossian I imagined the spirits of Loda were riding over our heads, the deep voiced thunder was a fine accompaniment to all these horrors. The storm soon subsided, & the black clouds now & then casting a shade on some of the wood, while others were gilded by the sun made most charming prospects & from the preceding rains the mountains poured down torrents from their sides, so that I imagine we saw this Country in the state best suited to its form & features.

In her letter to Lord Lyttelton from Spa, July 27, 1763, Mrs. Montagu describes at length the pleasing quality that comes from a combination of wild nature and superstition, as well as from melancholy poetry derived from such scenes:

A few years ago, an English Gentleman cut with admirable taste some winding walks all round the mountains here, so that you ascend & descend them without much labour, & at the summit of the hill you have the most noble prospect imaginable. Your eye travels over a wide circuit of country, of the most solemn & solitary kind I ever saw, & the other day as Mrs Carter & I were looking down on the Town of Spa from the mountain, the Cordeliers walk'd in procession with the Host; the deep voice of the chaunting, the grave & measured pace of the procession added much to the gloomy air of our prospect, & it deepen'd the murmur of the falling floods and shed a browner horror on the woods. I will own to your Lordship that I would rather have had some Druids performing their mystick rites on the mountain, than have seen a Romish superstition in the valley; however, whatever seems to invoke the presence

of powers unseen & mightier far than we

gives the mind a religious horror, & of all the species of terror, I will affirm, even in the teeth of Mr. Burk, the superstitious is the most sublime. I wish'd to have had Mr. Masons Caractacus in my pocket, my imagination so assisted wd have assembled the Druids & brought the Brittish Hero before my eyes. If we have any series of fine weather I shall have great delight in wandering over these majestick scenes of nature with my classical friend Mrs Carter. In the few walks we have been able to take, we have always from some poet found a proper motto for every picture, & I think one of the greatest pleasures poetry now gives me, is, when the objects before me bring to my mind some fine passage; for one recollects it with the same spirit with which it was written by the author, & I often feel on such occasions the truth of what Shakespeare advances, that the scholars melancholly is poetical. Indeed it is one of the great advantages of poetry, that it gives such a modulation to the softest & lowest tones of the mind, that even vacant air, a pathless desart, a wild & dreary forest, can suggest a thousand pleasing ideas, & where other dispositions would find only the dismal or the terrible, the poetical one finds the noble and sublime.

Three years later Mrs. Montagu made a trip into the Scottish Highlands and became even more enthusiastic over the wild scenery. Here she was gradually introduced to a picturesque landscape like that of the Italian painters admired by the romantics. On August 9 she wrote to her husband:⁹

I was at Ld Hoptons on thursday. The situation is prodigiously fine, the beauties of it are sublime, on the front stretches a vast canal as it were before the house, rocks & mountains rise at a distance, & little Islands in the sea diversifye the view. The house is very grand on the outside the inside is not so fine as some of our best English seats. I have an invitation to Ld Hoptons Brothers place which is more beautiful still tho not so great. I never saw prospect in England that cd vye with these. Claude Lorraine & Salvator Rosa seem to have combined in all the landscapes, for there is the richest cultivated land before you in many places with sharp rocky Hills rising behind it.

The actual journey into the Highlands is enthusiastically described to her sister Mrs. Scott, to Lord Lyttelton, and to Mrs. Vesey, but best of all to Mrs. Carter, whom she always addressed “my dear Friend.” The first letter, written August 18 near Glasgow, gives the realistic setting, in which Mrs. Montagu and Dr. Gregory, her friend and guide, drive into the mountains in two post chaises and with an entourage of servants.¹⁰

I am returning from Inverary; what I saw in my road thither cannot be described in a short time. The Lakes, the Mountains, & the rocks I have seen have so effaced all former objects, that I consider our Mountains at Spa as mole hills … Every Gentleman thinks it is his duty to accomodate strangers. They attend you, they lodge you, & what you know is more than meat & drink to me they amuse & please. They are learned & well bred. Dr. Gregory attends kindly on me, he & I philosophise & talk of Mrs Carter in my post chaise, Susan follows in another. Ned & Kit drive me. As to Ned he is truely miserable that he does not find so good stable as in England, & wd prefer Lincoln fenns with best oats & old hay to all the wild beauties we have seen & scotch stables. Harry is angry the people dont speak Welch, & Woodhouse thinks a Warwickshire accent wd mend their dialect.

Safely back at Denton on September 19, she sends Mrs. Carter a long description of how at night they read Ossian and “felt a stronger enthusiasm than mere words could inspire.” When they stopped at the stream of Cona, “on whose banks Ossian sung his sublimest strains,” they ate broiled fish freshly caught, and she imagined she heard “the sweet voice of Cona in the blast of the Desart, and saw Malvina weeping in the mist which veild the summit of the mountains.” The sublimity of the setting took her out of the petty world:

Sometimes the rocks hung threatening over our heads, in some places the torrents had washd away the earth, & the bare skeleton of some mountain appeard. … The cheeks of the mountains were furrowd by the falling streams, & the grey moss of age grew upon them; here & there a fir tree shatterd by a thousand storms, & huge rocks that had roll'd half way down, & waited another earthquake to compleat its journey, formd the terrible sublime. Never was my imagination so amazed.

Later she proposed to Mrs. Carter in a sentimental letter (dated “the 28”) that they get a house in the Highlands where they will drink goat's whey and read Ossian and Greek poetry. But when she got back to the Lowland country, Mrs. Montagu was quick to point out that there is also a charm in the picturesque of more peaceful scenes. She loves the simple countryside, which inspires melancholy rather than the fear inspired by the vast objects of the Highlands; that was epic, while Mr. Montagu's estate on the bank of the Tees is pastoral; she writes to Lord Lyttelton from Denton, October 13, 1766: “Sweet vallies full of fine Cattle, hanging woods down to the river, swelling hills crownd with stately oaks & beech; at a little distance a very pretty village.”

In the same vein she describes Lord Kames's place at Blair Drummond, in a letter to Mrs. Vesey, Denton, November 4, 1766:

You cannot imagine any thing more delightfull than a walk by the side of a rapid River where there are many natural cascades & beautifull rocks on the right hand; on the left, a deep wood, in view the ruined Castle of the Regent Murray … at my departure Ld Kames attended me to Stirling Castle, which is situated on a high rock, it commands a fine prospect, but the River runs in a line more crooked than the line of beauty, so that it seems to form various pools, & is less beautiful than the gentle serpentine.

III

The picturesque in nature is closely tied up with the picturesque in art, with Gothic architecture, and with the “Gothic ancestors” and their writings. “Our Gothick ancestors like their Gothick architecture,” wrote Mrs. Montagu to Lord Bath in an undated letter in the 1762 folder, “are fine objects consider'd as publick edifices; there is strength and solemnity in the structure, and a kind of irregular greatness which one looks upon with respect.” In 1762 Mrs. Montagu was reading older English literature with great interest: on June 17 she wrote to Mrs. Carter about Richard Hurd's Letters on Chivalry and Romance; on September 1 in a letter to her sister she refers to Chaucer as “the Father of British poetry”; in a letter to Mrs. Vesey on September 7 she pays her respect to King Arthur's round table; in a fragment in the 1763 folder she commends Amadis de Gaul as a romance for its adventures, its giants, and its dragons; and in a long critical letter to Mrs. Carter on October 3, inspired by reading Hurd, she compares classical and Gothic mythology and discusses the possible influence of Celtic on Milton.

The reading of Thomas Warton's Observations on the Fairy Queen, however, set off some of Mrs. Montagu's best criticism on the older literature, in which she definitely upholds imagination over reason. In a letter to Mrs. Carter on September 9, 1762, she writes:

I have been reading Mr Warton on Spencers fairy queen in his new augmented edition. Spencer is now little read from not being well understood. Mr Wartons notes will explain him to those who know little of our old legends & ancient manners, & I wish to see Spencer restored to his due rights in the realm of Parnassus. Mr Warton is a learned, ingenious, & elegant writer, not only familiar with the classicks but well versed in Gothick lore. I am glad some of our modern witts do not superciliously overlook those ages in which there were great Hero's & great poets tho all of Gothick structure. As Fable sometimes among a credulous people obtains as history, true history with a speculative sceptical people will pass for fable. If it were not for some of these searchers into the manners of the dark ages, Froissarts history wd in time be set beside Amadis de Gaul on the Romance shelf. Mr de Voltaire has made Philosophers of the Muses of Memory, & when they should relate they reason. I require fact not logick at their hands, & am sorry to see them diverted from their proper business.

In somewhat the same vein but so skillfully expressed as to deserve quoting, she wrote to Lord Bath from Sandleford on September 12, 1762:

In the true order of things the Poet should introduce the critick, but as Spenser has been long neglected, I wish the critick may reproduce the Poet. I value much those parts of Mr Warton that serve to illustrate the design of the Poet, to justify by history what now has the air of empty fiction & to shew us from whence many allusions were borrow'd; as to the lesser criticisms I own they are always tiresome to me. I am glad to see a man of classical taste not despising the Gothick learning. I have the same respect for it that I have for their architecture, I feel a veneration for their edifices tho I do not approve their style. There is something rudely great, & majestically severe in the sentiments & manners of our Forefathers, & I think we neglect too much that part of our history which gives the manners of the different ages. As in an ignorant & credulous age fables obtain belief as facts, so in a refined & sceptical one facts are in danger of passing for fables. Modern witts have taught the Daughters of Memory to reason when they should relate. Deep historians like modest travellers are afraid to tell the wonders of the countries they have seen, and customs widely differing from our own. Froissart in a few years will stand on the Romance shelf with Amadis de Gaul. The poets who write of Gothick manners must follow them. Truth is the great support of all things, even fiction must lean upon it. The mind disdains and rejects mere delusion & reverie, & is as disatisfied with a Poet who makes his work without any support of fact, as with the philosopher who has presented us with a World without Matter.

She praises older English writers, in a letter to Lord Bath, November 22, 1763, by criticizing Churchill for plundering from them:

I never could read twenty lines of Churchill's poetry at a time, it is all patchwork. There is hardly a compleat sentence in his works; the second line is very rarely connected with the first. He has taken scraps from every english poet from Robert de Langland the Predecessor of Chaucer to the present times, but especialy from the poets of the black letter, & he has darken'd, hardend, & stiffend his compositions with a mixture of Persius & Juvenal. His admired picture of famine is stolen from Robert Sackville first Earl of Dorset in the time of queen Elizabeth. Our old English Poets drew characters well; they were rough painters, & with very coarse colours & a harsh outline gave true pictures of nature. Their manner is unpolish'd, their allegories are tedious & their language is now obsolete, so they are little read, & a modern writer may steal undetected by most people; but as I look upon the progress of litterature as a very interesting part of history, I read these uncouth authors whenever I can meet with them. They have their merit too, their characters are taken from real life.

Like other romantic critics, Mrs. Montagu was greatly interested in Ossian, not only because of her personal interest in James Macpherson but also because she loved the wildness of the lines. We have already seen how she associated Ossian with the wild storms in the mountains on the road to Spa and with the scenery of the Scottish Highlands. She gives her reasons for this enthusiasm in a letter to Benjamin Stillingfleet from Spa, August 9, 1763, in a passage omitted by Blunt (I, 54):

When we have a fine day I strole about with my classical friend Mrs Carter & from some poet we find a motto for every prospect. These scenes to some people may appear dismal, but as Shakespear says, the scholars melancholly is poetical, & I feel the same delight in looking on these wild & noble scenes that I did in reading Fingal & Temora. I have scarce poetical enthusiasm enough to feel raptures in reading the song of the bards by my fireside, but recollected in such places as originally inspired them I have all the pleasing intoxication of poetry.

When Mrs. Montagu in 1767 visited Alnwick and Hulne Abbey (“nothing can be more Gothick,” she confided to Mrs. Carter), the picturesqueness of the situation was made more exciting by having Thomas Percy, the collector of ancient English poetry, show her the beauties of the place. On September 10, 1767, she wrote from Denton to the Bishop of Carlisle:

Mr Percy, as I was a friend of yours, shew'd me great civilities, & with all the spirit of a Poet, a Virtuoso, & an Antiquarian, shew'd me the various beauties, & uncommon features of the environs of Alnwick. He went with me in my Post chaise round the Dukes improvements, & to see Hulne Abbey. The environs of Alnewick are such as one would wish round a Castle. Every thing about it has a kind of hostile air. The Mountains seem to have been cast there when the Giants made war on Olympus; instead of softly whispering rivulets torrents roar through the Vallies, & those Vallies are as it were fortified by Rocks. The whole Country presents one with a great page of Gothick history.

On September 12, 1767, she describes the same scene to Leonard Smelt in a passage that combines wild scenery and moss-grown walls and Ossian:

The road leads to a dreadfull precipice from whose height you look upon a vast prospect magnificently rude, at the bottom winds the River Alne. On a little Hill on the edge of the River you behold with religious veneration the moss grown walls & ivy crowned turrets of Hulne Abby, the first foundation of the Carmelite order in England, founded in the reign of Henry the 3d. Now I believe you all think you have quitted the fertile plains long enough, & will be glad to return to them from the terrible beauties of this rough Country. I look upon this whole thing as a fragment of Ossian. The hill of storms, the angry floods, ghosts sighing in the blasts of the mountains, the rude rocks, the Cave of the Hunter, whatever makes the epick beauties in the book of nature is here.

The following winter Mrs. Montagu had collected Percy for her group of “bluestocking philosophers” who dined regularly at her Hill Street house in London. “He is a very ingenious man,” she writes to Mrs. Vesey on February 2, 1768, “has many anecdotes of ancient days, historical as well as poetical.” Thus was the bluestocking combined with the romantic. And yet her interest in exotic literature did not stop with the older English or the Celtic, for on June 4, presumably in 1770, she wrote her husband about the beauties of the Oriental poems in William Jones's collection:

I have lately been reading some beautiful pieces of Oriental poetry translated by a Mr Jones who has an astonishing faculty for languages. The greatest fault I find with these poems is the reverse of what we complain of in our climate, the sky is ever clear, the sun fervent & bright, the flowers overpower with their fragrance & the birds incessantly sing. The Poets of less happier climates & less luxuriant Souls wd sometimes introduce a Storm or paint a desart, which wd give an agreable variety. One sees plainly that if the Eastern Languages were known to us they have Authors in the East who wd share the Temple of Fame with those of the Western World, & Europe wd not assume all literary glory.

IV

From these samples it is clear that Mrs. Montagu was sensitive to the intellectual fashions that later flowered into what we term “romantic.” When she became philosophical about nature, however, especially in her letters to Mrs. Carter and to Lord Bath, she found it very easy to drift into sentimentality until the practical side of her temperament checked her romantic reveries. Yet even under the bookish style of her philosophical letters, there is the sincerity that is later reflected in Wordsworth's poetry on the theme of divine wisdom revealed in the contemplation of nature. This is shown in a letter to Lord Bath, August 8, 1762 (extract in Blunt, I, 31), where after describing her dislike of public places where there are no friends, she speaks of the joys of solitude and contemplation:

If I cannot enjoy my friends society, then I wish for solitude. When I am sitting in my garden, I can add myself to the whole mass of created beings. I consider some insects feeding on a flower which like them was call'd forth by the rising sun, & whose race & task of life will end with its decline. My imagination can travel on, till it gets to those planets whose revolution round the sun is many years in accomplishing. From thence I can rise to the contemplation of that great Being, before whom, these planets & their inhabitants fade like the morning flower & the frail insect, while he remains unchanged in his permanent existence. Nearly allied to the insect, graciously adopted by the eternal, I find no foundation for pride, no pretence for discontent. My hopes, fears, desires, interests, are all lost in the vast ocean of infinity & Eternity. Dare I find fault with the form or fashion of any thing that relates to me in the presence of him before whom all modes & forms pass away, to whose duration all the systems of Worlds beyond Worlds, & suns beyond suns, are more transient than the flowers of our parterres are to us. From these thoughts I draw a philosophick peace & tranquillity for what atom in this stupendous system shall presume to find fault with its place & destination.

Again in a letter to Mrs. Carter, June 5, 1764, she tells how she passed her first week at her country place at Sandleford by sitting in the garden listening to the birds morning and night and to “the noontide hum of insects,” and how from them she got a solace not to be found in books:

I was too agreably amused even to want to read much, and what can one read so agreably as the great volume of infinite wisdom in this fair creation! In books of doctrine how much false reasoning! in history how many shocking facts! in poetry how many dangerous allurements! But while one contemplates the creatures who have instinct for their guide there is no error nor mischief, nor vice to offend one. The same wise wisdom that taught the day spring to know his place, teaches the insect where to find his food, and the little bird where to make his nest. When one considers the majesty of his power in his great works, the tenderness of his mercies in his lesser, all other things fade in ones esteem, & can have no part of ones admiration.

But Mrs. Montagu was a realist when it was necessary. The quiet lady who knew how to manage thriving coal mines in the north of England also knew when to check the rush of sentimental enthusiasm. For example, in a letter to Lord Lyttelton, May 24, 1764, she begins with a study of “the great volume of Divine Wisdom” as revealed in springtime and ends with the misery she sees around her at Sandleford:

Philosophers, Poets, Divines give poor lessons compared to a summers day. The quire of birds in the morning, the noontide humm of winged insects, the evenings lowing of the cattle, the song of Philomela at night while the stars glitter around leads minds to the great Author of all Being. … But it is time to check my enthusiasm, & indeed I should fancy myself dans le meilleur de tous les mondes possible, if I was not apply'd to from the sick & the miserable very often. [She describes poverty resulting from a hard winter.] If the coal mines prosper & Mr Montagu gives me a share of them, I will always keep a certain sum by me, for whirlwinds, floods, & fire. Money is realy a fine thing, when, like a magicians wand, it can rebuild houses, & bid harvests rise in places where desolation reigns.

To Mrs. Vesey on June 5, 1764, she gushes in even more sentimental style about nature, only to return to humorous reality in the manner of Sterne:

In the evening I went out in my post chaise, admired the prospects gilded by the setting sun in some places, darkend by the lengthend shadows in others, drove thro' the villages where the labourer was returning from his work, the children from school; the cows going from milking to their pasture, & the sheep retiring to the fold. From these the mind catches the tone of peace & a disposition to repose, & I used to return to my dressing room, pass an hour or two reading till the night had hung forth her golden lamps & Philomel began to chaunt her love labourd song, then I took another walk in my garden … Least you should envy me, if you are at Dublin, I will confess, I am now sitting by the fireside. A northeast wind has blasted all the rural scene, & the garlands on the brow of May began to fade a week ago.

Such letters as these reveal Mrs. Montagu's real nature better than commentary. She was a combination of the romantic and the realist, the bluestocking and the business woman, the collector of celebrities and the plain everyday woman. Nowhere did she show her domestic nature better than in her letters to her sister, Mrs. Scott, which have been neglected because they contain little of the brilliance of her letters to Lord Lyttelton and Mrs. Carter, nothing of the effusive sentiment of those to Lord Bath and Mrs. Vesey, and little about her literary friends. The Huntington collection has numerous unpublished letters to Mrs. Scott that reveal Mrs. Montagu as the plain woman with no frills or pretence, but two short quotations will illustrate the point and at the same time serve as an antidote to the romantic side shown in this article. The first is Mrs. Montagu's account of going to court with Mrs. Pulteney on the first appearance of the Queen after the birth of a child in 1768: “My cloaths were heavy & I was very weary, & reflected often on the honest proverb that pride is painful. Both their Majesties were very gracious to me, but still my uncourtly legs aked abominably. I was realy in pain for the queen who looked much fatigued, & I think after lying in such a laborious day is enough to kill her, & all one hears of her makes one love her.” The other is the frank account, in a letter dated September 27, 1767, of the part she was beginning to play in the management of Mr. Montagu's coal mines:

My imagination is apt to sport in the regions of poetry but every one knows no harvests are reapd there. I have long seen that Mr Montagus estate was capable of considerable improvement, & urged it to him; he being averse to trouble was always angry, & for fear of having the visionary tipp'd upon me I durst not get any of my family to speak to him. With the profoundest mystery I shall proceed in all these matters, & when the money comes into my pocket no one shall hear it clink, for they will be apt to say it is Counters which I mistook for guineas. I have got Mr Montagu a handsome round sum already by his Colliery, tho the coal trade labours under strange difficulties at present. … I think all is in so regular a system now, I shall have little trouble for the future, but if my Lady Fortune was a witt, I shd think she had a mind to make fun of a man of Mr Montagus disposition when she gave him his various properties in Northumberland & the County of Durham, Coal Mines great & small, lead mines, stone quarries, Way leaves, Staith rents, Brick ground.

These samples from the richness of the Montagu collection are enough to show Mrs. Montagu as a very versatile, intelligent, and capable woman. As she playfully confesses to her sister in a letter, December 26, 1767, she is “a Critick, a Coal owner, a Land Steward, a sociable creature,” and therefore she must write and write, even though the doctors have forbidden her to do so because of the painful disorder in her jaws and teeth. With her teeth aching and her husband away at Sandleford, she chases boredom by inviting to dinner “Scavans, Beaux esprits, le Beau monde, le bon ton, & all the sorts & kinds of things that make up society.” Her life was never empty or dull, and her record of it in the letters lovingly preserved by her correspondents is lively and rewarding.

Notes

1. The best general account of Mrs. Montagu's public life is probably that of R. Huchon, Mrs. Montagu and her Friends, 1720-1800 (London, 1907).

2. There is, for example, a good deal of pleasant raillery about her brother, the Rev. William Robinson, best known as the friend of the poet Gray and father-in-law of Samuel Egerton Brydges. I edited from the collection some interesting travel letters of Robinson's, “The William Robinsons in Italy,” Huntington Library Quarterly, IV, (1941), 343-57.

3. Matthew Montagu, Letters of Mrs. E. Montagu (London, 1808-1813).

4. Emily J. Climenson, Elizabeth Montagu, the Queen of the Blue-stockings: Her Correspondence from 1720 to 1761 (London, 1906).

5. Reginald Blunt, Elizabeth Montagu, “Queen of the Blues”: Her Letters and Friendships from 1762 to 1800 (Boston and New York, 1923).

6. John Doran, A Lady of the Last Century (London, 1873).

7. From Anne to Victoria: Essays by Various Hands, ed. Bonamy Dobree (London, 1937), p. 187.

8. All references are to uncatalogued letters in the Montagu Collection in the Huntington Library. The letters are reproduced faithfully except that superior letters have been lowered.

9. This extract immediately precedes that published by Blunt, I, 145, where the romantic Castle of Edinburgh is described.

10. The description of the whole journey is given by extracts in Blunt, I, 143-47, but the wilder passages are omitted by him.