A lady of the last century

by Dr. Doran

CHAPTER I.

Elizabeth Robinson, who became so well known, subsequently, as Mrs. Montagu, belongs altogether to the eighteenth century. She was born at York, in October, 1720. She died in the last year of that century, 1800. Miss Robinson was of a family, the founder of which, William Robinson, a London merchant, but a descendant of a line of Scottish barons, bought, in 1610, the estate of Rokeby, in Yorkshire, from Sir Thomas Rokeby, whose ancestors had held it from the time of the Conquest. Her father, Matthew Robinson, was an only son of a cadet branch of the Robinsons. He was a member of the University of Cambridge, where he wooed the Muses less ardently than he did Miss Elizabeth Drake, a beautiful heiress, whom he married when he was only eighteen years of age. The very young couple settled at Edgeley, in Yorkshire; but the husband (owner, through his wife, of more than one estate in the country) preferred the shady side of Pall Mall to fields of waving corn or groves vocal with nightingales.

Of the twelve children of this marriage, seven sons and two daughters survived their youth. The daughters, Elizabeth and Sarah, were endowed with the same literary tastes. Sarah wrote the more books, but Elizabeth is the better remembered. The church, the law, politics, and commerce attracted one or other of the sons.

In 1730, the head of the elder branch of the Robinsons, Thomas, was created a baronet. He was that famous Long Tom Robinson of whom so many well-known stories are told. Chesterfield slightly touched him in an epigram, and Walpole seldom referred to him without a sarcasm. At the coronation of George the Third, Sir Thomas was mock Duke of Normandy, who, with an equally English and mock Duke of Aquitaine, was supposed to indicate that the King of England was as much King of France, by the grace of God, as he pretended to be. Long Sir Thomas was so truly an Englishman that he went to France, and into French society, in his hunting-suit. A satirical French abbé, hearing his name and looking at his marvellous attire, gravely asked him if he were Robinson Crusoe.

Long Sir Thomas Robinson sold Rokeby to the Morritts in 1769. When he died, in 1777, his title went to his next surviving brother, Richard. This Richard was an English clergyman, who, in 1731, had commenced a successful career in Ireland, as chaplain to two viceroys, and he was successively Bishop of Killala, of Leighlin and Ferns, and of Kildare. Finally, he was raised to the dignity of Archbishop of Armagh, primate of Ireland. In the year that Sir Thomas died, Richard was created an Irish peer, Baron Rokeby of Armagh, with remainder to Mrs. Montagu’s father, Matthew Robinson. The father did not live to succeed to the title, but his son Matthew did. The present Lord Rokeby is Mrs. Montagu’s great grandnephew, and was born when she was yet living, A. D. 1798. The first lord figures largely in this lady’s letters. His good works made him popular in Ireland, which his Grace found to be a fine country to live out of, as much as was, more or less, consistent with duty. He was one of the best-known characters at Bath during successive seasons; he also suffered much from the gout; but he endured with alacrity all the port and claret that were necessary to keep it out of his archiepiscopal stomach.

Thus much for Mrs. Montagu’s family. She derived from it a certain distinction; but she enjoyed greater advantage, for a time at least, from the marriage of her maternal grandmother, who took for her second husband the learned and celebrated Dr. Conyers Middleton. Doctor Middleton’s home was at Cambridge, where a few of Miss Robinson’s youthful years were profitably and curiously spent.

Curiously—from the method which the biographer of Cicero took with the bright and intelligent girl. Among the divines, scholars, philosophers, travellers, men of the world who were, together or in turn, to be met with at Doctor Middleton’s house, the figure of the silent, listening, and observant little maid was always to be seen. Her presence there was a part of her education. Doctor Middleton trained her to give perfect attention to the conversation, and to repeat to him all that she could retain of it, after the company had dispersed. When she had to speak of what she did not well understand, Doctor Middleton enlightened his little pupil. This process not only filled her young mind with knowledge, but made her eager in the pursuit of more.

How readily she received impressions at an early age, and how indelibly they were stamped on her memory, she has herself recorded. “One of the strongest pictures in my mind,” she wrote to Lord Lyttelton, in 1759, “is the funeral of a Dean of York, which I saw performed with great solemnity in the cathedral, when I was about four years old. Whether the memory of it, added to the present objects, may not have made the place appear the more awful to me, I do not know; but I was never so affected by any edifice.” She loved York, and in her early Yorkshire home the plan of education went far in advance of the views, and perhaps of the powers, of family governesses. Masters, as well as mistresses, were there for the instruction of both sons and daughters; but Elizabeth’s father sharpened and stimulated her intellect by encouraging her to make smart repartees to his own witty or severe judgments. In this cudgelling of brains Matthew had great delight till he found that his daughter was too much for him at his most favourite weapons. Matthew then bit his lips, and ceased to offer challenge or give provocation.

Matthew Robinson’s wife seems to have been educated according to the traditions of a school founded in 1673 for the purpose of raising women to the dignity and usefulness which distinguished their ancestresses. The lady, Mrs. Makin, who originated this school for English maidens, stated her object in an essay, of which a few words may be said, as illustrative of a system of female education in England which, founded nearly half a century before Elizabeth Robinson was born, had not lost all its influence till after she herself was to be reckoned among learned young ladies. The work in question was called “An Essay to revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen in Religion, Manners, Arts, and Tongues: With an Answer to the Objections against this way of Education.” In the dedication to the Lady Mary, daughter of James, Duke of York, the author says: “The barbarous custom to breed women low is grown general amongst us, and hath prevailed so far, that it is verily believed that women are not endowed with such reason as man.” Of old, Mrs. Makin says, women were highly educated; but now, “not only learning, but virtue itself, is scorned and neglected as pedantic things, fit only for the vulgar.” The remedy enjoined for this matter is thus stated: “Were a competent number of schools erected to educate Ladies ingeniously, methinks I see how ashamed men would be of their ignorance, and how industrious the next generation would be to wipe off the reproach!” The author adds: “Let not your Ladyship be offended that I do not, as some have wittily done, plead for female preëminence. To ask too much, is the way to be denied all.”

To prove that women were formerly educated in arts and tongues, the author names a score and more of Greek, Roman, and other ladies celebrated for their proficiency in those respects.

“How,” asks the author, “could the Sibyls have invented heroic, or Sappho ‘sapphick,’ or Corinna have thrice beaten Pindar at lyric verses, if they had not been highly educated?” And to prove that the young ladies of both Greece and Rome were instructed in all kinds of good literature, the writer refers to a learned duel between twenty ladies a side, from each nation, in which the Grecian women came off the better in philosophy, and the Roman superior in oratory.

As instances of admirably educated English women, the following persons are named, with much eulogistic comment:

The Lady Jane Gray. The “present Duchess of Newcastle, who, by her own genius, rather than any timely instruction, overtops many grave Gown-men.” The Countess Dowager of Huntingdon, a pupil of Mrs. Makin’s; “well she understands Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, and Spanish,” and “what a proficient she is in arts subservient to Divinity, in which (if I durst, I would tell you) she excels.” The Princess Elizabeth, daughter to King Charles the First, to whom Mrs. Makin was tutoress, “at nine years old, could write, read, and in some measure understand Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, and Italian: had she lived, what a miracle she would have been of her sex. Mrs. Thorold, daughter of the Lady Car, in Lincolnshire, was excellent in philosophy, and all sorts of learning. I cannot, without injury, forget the Lady Mildmay and Doctor Love’s daughters: their worth and excellency in learning is yet fresh in the memory of many men.” Finally, as the greatest sample of all, the author describes Queen Elizabeth at some length, who, “according to Ascham, read more Greek in a day than many of the doctors of her time did Latin in a week.”

In the Postscript to the above essay, the following passages occur:

“If any enquire where this education may be performed, such may be informed that a school is lately erected for Gentlewomen, at Tottenham High Cross, within four miles of London, on the road to Ware, where Mrs. Makin is governess, who was formerly tutoress to the Princess Elizabeth, daughter to King Charles the First. Where, by the blessing of God, Gentlewomen may be instructed in the Principles of religion, and in all manner of sober and virtuous Education: more particularly in all things ordinarily taught in other schools.

“As Works of all sorts	}	Half the time to be spent in these things.
Dancing	}
Musick	}
Singing	}
Writing	}
Keeping accompts	}

“The other half to be employed in gaining the Latin and French tongues; and those that please may learn Greek and Hebrew, the Italian and Spanish: in all which this Gentlewoman hath a competent knowledge.

“Gentlewomen of eight or nine years old, that can read well, may be instructed in a year or two (according to their parts) in the Latin and French tongues; by such plain and simple Rules, accommodated to the Grammar of the English tongue, that they may easily keep what they have learned, and recover what they shall lose; as those that learn Musick by Notes.

“Those that will bestow longer time may learn the other languages aforementioned, as they please.

“Repositories also for Visibles shall be prepared; by which, from beholding the things, Gentlewomen may learn the Names, Natures, Values, and Use of Herbs, Shrubs, Trees, Mineral-pieces, Metals, and Stones.

“Those that please may learn Limning, Preserving, Pastry, and Cookery.

“Those that will allow longer time may attain some general knowledge in Astronomy, Geography, but especially in Arithmetick and History.

“Those that think one language enough for a Woman, may forbear the Languages, and learn only Experimental Philosophy, and more or fewer of the other things aforementioned, as they incline.

“The Rate certain shall be £20 per annum: But if a competent improvement be made in the Tongues, and the other things aforementioned, as shall be agreed upon, then something more will be expected. But the parents shall judge what shall be deserved by the Undertaker.

“Those that think these Things Improbable, or Impracticable, may have further account every Tuesday, at Mr. Mason’s Coffee-house, in Cornhill, near the Royal Exchange; and Thursdays, at the ‘Bolt and Tun,’ in Fleet Street, between the hours of three and six in the afternoon, by some person whom Mrs. Makin shall appoint.”

Mrs. Makin’s school, under herself and her successors, and her system, adopted by imitators, had good influences in their “little day.” Those influences continued beyond that period in families like that of Mrs. Robinson, where every variety of knowledge was accounted valuable. It was a period when grace of carriage was held by others to be as necessary as a well-stored mind; and very popular in some English households was a little volume from the French, called “The Art of being Easy at all Times and in all Places, written chiefly for the use of a Lady of Quality.”

In the Robinson family, personal grace came naturally; but the mind was cultivated. Indeed, in that household, the wits were not allowed to rust. It was the delight of those bright girls and boys to maintain or to denounce, for the sport’s sake, some particular argument set up for the purpose. Occasionally the pleasant skirmish would develop into something like serious battle. The triumphant laugh of the victor would now and then bring tears to the eyes of the vanquished. At such times there was a moderator of the excited little assembly. The mother of the young disputants sat at a table close at hand. She read or worked; sometimes she listened smilingly, sometimes was not without apprehension. But she was equal to the emergency. Her children recognised her on such occasions as “Mrs. Speaker;” and that much-loved dignitary always adjourned the house when victory was too hotly contested, or when triumph seemed likely to be abused.

It is hard to believe that Elizabeth Robinson, who was the liveliest of these disputants, assumed or submitted to the drudgery of copying the whole of the Spectator, when she was only eight years of age. Her courage and perseverance, however, were equal to such a task; but her energies were often turned in another direction. She was as unreservedly given to dancing, she tells us, as if she had been bitten by a tarantula. She as ardently loved fun—“within the limits of becoming mirth”—as she devotedly pursued learning.

“My mind used to sleep,” she writes to Lord Lyttelton, “eight or ten hours without even the visitation of a dream, and rose in the morning, like Aurora, throwing freshness and joy on every object, tricked itself out in sunbeams, and set in gay and glowing colours.” With a head furnished with knowledge beyond that possessed by most girls of her age; with feet restless and impatient to join any dance anywhere; she had a heart most sisterly and tenderly attuned to love for, and sympathy with, her brothers. “I have seven of them,” she wrote, while she was yet in her teens, “and would not part with one for a kingdom. If I had but one, I should be distracted about him. Surely, no one has so many or so good brothers.” This is only one out of a score of such testimonies of sisterly affection.

There are some significant traces of the effects of this lady’s early training in the letters which she wrote from the time she was twelve years of age till she had reached her twenty-second year, when she married. These letters were addressed to a friend older than herself, Lady Margaret Cavendish Harley, who, in 1734, became Duchess of Portland. They are sprightly and forcible, but they are not “girlish.” In one of the earliest, written at Horton, near Hythe, Kent (one of the estates which Matthew gained by his marriage), she says: “My papa is a little vapoured, and last night, after two hours’ silence, he broke out into a great exclamation against the country, and concluded by saying, that living in the country was sleeping with one’s eyes open. He has ordered me to put a double quantity of saffron in his tea.” For what purpose this remedy was ordered, may be guessed from a passage in a comedy of Charles the Second’s time, by Howard. “Saffron-posset-drink is very good against the heaviness of the spirits,” says Mrs. Arbella, in “The Committee.”

Young Miss Robinson was fond of illustrating her early letters by images taken from life, and set up after the fashion of popular novelists. One of these figures occurs in a letter addressed to the Duchess of Portland, in May, 1734, when the lively writer had not yet completed her fourteenth year: “I am surprised that my answer to your Grace’s letter has never reached your hands. I sent it immediately to Canterbury, by the servant of a gentleman who dined here; and I suppose he forgot to put it in the post.... If my letter were sensible, what would be its mortification, that, instead of having the honour to kiss your Grace’s hands, it must live confined in the footman’s pocket, with greasy gloves, rotten apples, mouldy nuts, a pack of dirty cards, and the only companion of its sort—a tender epistle from his sweetheart, ‘tru till Deth;’ perhaps, by its situation, subject to be kicked by his master every morning, till at last, by ill-usage and rude company, worn too thin for any other use, it may make its exit by lighting a tobacco-pipe.”

The young writer of the above was not only remarkably observant of all that passed around her, but generally showed her reading by a quotation that should give force to the description of what she observed. Thus, in writing to her dear duchess, who had been suffering from fever (A. D. 1734), Miss Robinson remarks: “I shall put on as musty a face at your Grace’s fever as Miss W—— could make at the face of Doctor Sandys, to describe the horror of which would require at least as tragic a bard as Lee; for then she would look, good gods! how she would look!” This may smack of priggishness; but there was nothing of that, nor of false prudery, in Elizabeth Robinson’s character. Before she was fifteen, she had some experiences not likely to fall to the lot of young ladies of the present day. “I have in winter,” she writes to Mrs. Anstey, “gone eight miles to dance to the music of a blind fiddler, and returned at two o’clock in the morning, mightily pleased that I had been so well entertained.” Indeed, young ladies seem to have been thoroughly emancipated, and to have been abroad in the “wee sma’ hours ’ayont the twal,” enjoying all the perils consequent on such rather wild doings. In 1738, when our young lady was not quite eighteen, she went, with two of her brothers and her sister, eight miles to the play, from her Kentish home; and she tells the Duchess of Portland, “After the play, the gentlemen invited all the women to a supper at the inn, where we stayed till two o’clock in the morning, and then all set out for our respective homes.” The frolicsome damsel adds, “Before I had gone two miles, I had the pleasure of being overturned, at which I squalled for joy.” It was, perhaps, this indulgence in fun and late hours, joined to much solid reading, that made this youthful reveller and student hate early morning hours as she hated cards. But her “quality” was favourably shown in her ready observance of the law and custom of the house in which she happened to be a sojourner. There is no better proof than this of what is understood by “good breeding.” She would rather have gone down to breakfast at noon than at nine; but if the breakfast-hour of her entertainers was at eight, there was the young guest at table, fresh as the rose and brighter than the dawn. She amusingly illustrated this matter once, by writing from a house where she was tarrying, “Six o’clock in the morning; New Style.”

In fact, few things came amiss to her. No doubt she preferred Mary-le-bone Gardens to those at Edgeley or at Horton. She was happy in both, but happier in the fashionable gardens nearer London; for Mary-le-bone was still out of town. Elizabeth Robinson’s day is described, on one of these occasions, as breakfasting in Mary-le-bone Gardens at ten; giving a sitting to Zincke after midday, for her well-known miniature portrait as Anne Boleyn; and spending the evening at Vauxhall. At the nobility’s private balls given in the first-named suburban paradise, Elizabeth Robinson was amongst the gayest and fairest of the revellers. Before the dance began in those days the ladies’ fans were thrown upon a table, and the men then drew them for partners, each taking for his own the lady to whom the fan which he had drawn, and which he presented to her, belonged. It was not all breakfasting and dancing in those gardens. There was a large plunging-bath there, much used by fashionable Naiads, who rose from silken couches, donned a bathing-dress, took headers into the waters, gambolled in and under them till they were breathless, and then went home to dress for other enjoyments. When the Duchess of Portland heard of her young friend’s plunging delights, she expressed herself “frightened out of her wits.” But, on the other hand, Lord Dupplin wrote a couple of verses on this particular Naiad, and in honour of the poet, the laughing nymph again and again took headers into the glad waters of Mary-le-bone.

The home scenes of her life in the country come out strong in contrast with those of her life in London. In a lively sketch of one of these scenes, drawn for the duchess’s amusement, the youthful artist thus joyously describes herself and her doings:

“One common objection to the country is, one sees no faces but those of one’s own family; but my papa thinks he has found a remedy for that, by teaching me to draw; but then he husbands these faces in so cruel a manner, that he brings me sometimes a nose, sometimes an eye, at a time; but on the king’s birthday, as it was a festival, he brought me out a whole face, with its mouth wide open.” In another letter, she says: “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 very apt scholar; and when I told him I found their 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 dismalised ten times more than they were before, I threw away my pencil. If I drew a group of little figures, I made their countenances so sad and their limbs so distorted, that from a set of laughing Cupids, they looked like the tormented infants in Herod’s cruelty, and smiling, became like Rachel weeping for her children.” After more in this strain, she calls herself 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 ... you would have thought they had seen their own faces in the glass.”

Her failure in the above respect at home found ample compensation in success at Tunbridge Wells, at Bath, and at country races, at all of which Elizabeth Robinson’s beauty attracted all eyes; her vivacious wit charmed or stung all ears. At these places, she studied life quite as much as she enjoyed its pleasures; and she could not go down a dance at the Wells or at “The Bath,” without making little mental epigrams on the looks of newly married people, the manners of lovers, and the doings of eccentric folk. These found their way, in writing, to her ducal friend, who had already bestowed on the restless maiden the nickname of “La Petite Fidget.”

At Bath, she was as restless, as observant, and as epigrammatic as at Tunbridge Wells. She describes Bath life, in 1740, as consisting all the morning of “How d’ye does?” and all night of “What’s Trumps?” The women, in the “Ladies’ Coffee House,” talk only of diseases. The men, “except Lord Noel Somerset, are altogether abominable. There is not one good; no, not one.” Among the lady eccentrics, was a certain dowager duchess, who, said Miss Robinson, “bathes, and, being very tall, had nearly drowned a few women in the Cross Bath; for she had ordered it to be filled till it reached her chin; and so all those who were below her stature, as well as her rank, were obliged to come out or drown.”

The glance thus obtained into the Bath itself only gives, as it were, a momentary view of the fashionable people in those fashionable waters. They who compare old accounts with what is now to be seen will agree that he who looks, at the present day, into the dull, dark, and simmering waters can have no conception of the jollity, frolic, riot, dissipation, and indecorum which once reigned there. There was a regular promenade in the waters, and the promenaders were of both sexes. They were in bathing-costumes, and walked with the water nearly up to their necks. The heads of the shorter people appeared to be floating. At the same time, they were frolicking, or flirting, or otherwise amusing themselves. Those who came for sanitary purposes were hanging on by the rings in the wall, and were sedulously parboiling themselves. The Cross Bath was the famous quality bath. Handsome japanned bowls floated before the ladies, laden with confectionery, or with oils, essences, and perfumery for their use. Now and then one of these bowls would float away from its owner, and her swain would float after it, bring it again before her, and, if he were in the humour, would turn on his back and affect to sink to the bottom, out of mere rapture at the opportunity of serving her. The spectators in the gallery looked on, laughed, or applauded till the hour for closing came. Therewith came half-tub chairs, lined with blankets, whose owners plied for fares, and carried home the steaming freight at a sharp trot and a shilling for the job.

Elizabeth Robinson’s friendship with Lord Lyttelton is well known. At a court assembly, at St. James’s, in 1740, the gentleman in question was present. He was then plain Mr. Lyttelton, son and heir of Sir Thomas, and about a year over thirty. The young lady observed him in the brilliant scene more closely and more approvingly than she did others. “The men were not fine,” she writes to her Grace; but she makes exception. “Mr. Lyttelton was, according to Polonius’ instruction, rich, not gaudy; costly, but not exprest in fancy.” In her eyes and to her mind, he was a perfect gentleman and scholar. “Mr. Lyttelton has something of an elegance in all his compositions, let the subject be ever so trifling.... Happy is the genius that can drink inspiration at every stream and gather similes with every nosegay.” Alas! the elegance of the last century embraced much that was otherwise. The present Lord Lyttelton would not dare to read aloud to a company of ladies and gentlemen the once popular and elegant poem which his ancestor addressed to Belinda!

In the days here referred to, there were two circumstances to which all maidens looked forward as their probable but not equally desirable lot, namely, marriage and the smallpox. The latter fell on Elizabeth Robinson’s sister Sarah, when the family were resident at Horton, near Hythe. The elder sister was sent to a neighbouring gentleman farmer’s, so called solely because he tilled a few acres of his own. Here, the Iphigenia aroused unwonted sympathies in the breast of the Squire Cymons. She would have nothing to do with furthering the humanising process of those dull and thirsty clods. Their scarlet waistcoats did not impress her like Mr. Lyttelton’s birthday suit at court. One heaving swain, she thought, would make an admirable Polyphemus! He stared at her just as the calves did; but the calves had instinct enough not to say anything to her. They were preferable to the squire, to whom the young girl, with her bright intellect, could not be persuaded “to lend out her liking on land security.” There is a world of meaning in what she wrote on that occasion to her correspondent: “I liked neither him nor myself any better for all the fine things he said.” She was a creature not to be wooed or won by a tippling, foxhunting clown, rich in the possession of dirt. She had finely strung sensibilities, which would not attune themselves to “the loud laugh which speaks the vacant mind.” Mrs. Pendarves, who saw much of her in the town and country mansions of the Duchess of Portland, recognised the above fact. “Fidget,” she wrote, in the year last named, “is a most interesting creature; but I shall not attempt to draw a likeness.... There are some delicate touches that would foil the skill of a much abler artist than I pretend to be.”

Just then her fears for her sister were even stronger than her antipathies for her Kentish lovers. In order to satisfy her eagerness to be assured that the sister she loved was out of danger, the latter was allowed to walk veiled into the fields, within speaking distance of the other. Veiled, because she had cruelly suffered, and it was thought better not to shock the elder sister by a sight of the devastation which the foul disease had worked temporarily on the beauty of the younger. Thus, the sisters stood, for a brief time, speaking all that love and hope suggested, and the sound of the convalescent sister’s voice fell like delicious music on the heart of the listener.

With renewed health came uninterrupted happiness, and gay mingling in gay society, and audacity of expression when describing it. Elizabeth Robinson had felt almost as much contempt for the fops among the soldiers of her day, as disgust for the country Polyphemuses who made her wrathful with their wooing. Very severe was she on “the scarlet beaux,” who were ordered to Flanders. “I think,” she says, “they will die of a panic and save their enemies’ powder. Well! they are proper gentlemen. Heaven defend the nunneries! I will venture a wager Flanders increases in the christenings more than in the burials of the week.”

In describing changes in fashion, she makes singular application of her historical knowledge. In 1741, she wrote to her sister, from town: “I do not know what will become of your fine shape, for there is a fashionable make which is very strange. I believe they look in London as they did in Rome after the Rape of the Sabines!”

As this fair young Elizabeth remembered her history on one occasion, so did she show on another that she had not forgotten her church catechism. “As for modern marriages,” wrote the lady, just then going out of her teens, “they are great infringers of the baptismal vow; for it is commonly the pomps and vanities of this wicked world on one side, and the sinful lusts of the flesh on the other.”

There are traces throughout Miss Robinson’s early letters of how it went with her own heart and its sympathies. In her eighteenth year, she wrote to the Duchess of Portland: “I never saw one man that I loved.” She added to this assertion such an endless list of virtues, merits, qualities, etc., which she expected to find in that happy individual, as to lead to the conclusion that a monster so faultless would never be created. She even half-acknowledged as much; for she wrote, “I am like Pygmalion, in love with a picture of my own drawing; but I never saw an original like it in my life. I hope when I do, I shall, as some poet says, find the ‘statue warm.’” In her nineteenth year, she gave utterance to a pretty petulance in these words: “I wish some of our neighbours had married two and twenty years ago; we should have had a gallant young neighbourhood; but they have lost time, and we have lost lovers by that delay.” To a remark of her sister’s, that, if she were not heedful, some handsome fool would win her in spite of herself, she replied, that, to win her heart, “it must be rather fair-spoken than fair-faced.” She was not much moved when rivals in beauty passed into the married state before her. In 1741, there are the following autobiographical details in letters to the wife of the Reverend Mr. Freind, of Canterbury: “I saw some fine jewels that are to adorn my fair enemy, Mrs. S——. I beheld them without envy, and was proud to think that a woman who is thought worthy to wear jewels to adorn her person, should do me the honour to envy and hate me.... Surely, of all vanities, that of jewels is the most ridiculous; they do not even tend to the order of dress, beauty, and cleanliness; for a woman is not a jot the handsomer or cleaner for them.” And again: “I am confined again by a little feverishness. I thought, as it was a London fever, it might be polite, so I carried it to the Ridotto, court, and opera, but it grew perverse and stubborn, so I put it into a white hood and double handkerchief, and kept it by the fireside these three days, and it is better; indeed, I hope it is worn out. On Saturday, I intend to go to Goodman’s Fields, to see Garrick act ‘Richard the Third’ that I may get one cold from a regard to sense. I have sacrificed enough to folly, in catching colds at the great puppet-shows in town.”

Subsequently, she would have her friend’s husband believe that she was another fair vestal of the west, who meant to pass through the world in maiden meditation, fancy-free. She writes to the Reverend Dean of Canterbury: “I have lately studied my own foibles, and have found that I should make a very silly wife and an extremely foolish mother, and so have as far resolved as is consistent with deference to reason and advice, never to trouble any man or to spoil any children.” This was but banter. Only the year before, her sister having made a jest of her love for heroes of antiquity, Elizabeth Robinson oracularly answered, “I believe I shall do my errand before many people think; but prudence shall be my guide. A living man,” exclaims the wise virgin, “is better than a dead hero!”

In 1741, this decided young lady was wooed by a fashionable lover, and also by a noble lover who was her senior by a good many years. The former was dismissed, and the young lady wrote to her sister in the above year: “Poor M. B. takes his misfortune so to heart, that I really pity him; but I have no balsam of heartsease for him. If he should die, I will have him buried in Westminster Abbey, next to the woman who died with the prick of a finger, for it is quite as extraordinary; and he shall have his figure languishing in wax, with ‘Miss Robinson fecit,’ written over his head. I really compassionate his sufferings and pity him; but though I am as compassionate, I am as cold as charity. He pours out his soul in lamentations to his friends, and all—

‘But the nymph that should redress his wrong,

Attend his passion, and approve his song!’

... I am glad he has such a stock of flesh to waste upon.... I am really quite fat; and if there were not some hope that I might get lean again, by raking in town, I should be uneasy at it. I am now the figure of ‘Laugh-and-be-fat,’ and begin to think myself a comely personage. Adieu! Supper is on table.”

And the saucy nymph “really did her errand” before many thought. She declined the offer of the man of fashion, and said “Yes” to the suit of the older scholar and gentleman.

The practical conclusion came in due time. In the Gentleman’s Magazine for August, A. D. 1742, there is the record of eleven marriages. Four of them saucily chronicle the fortunes of the brides. Among the other seven may be read this brief announcement: “August 5, Edward Montagu, Esq., member for Huntingdon, to the eldest daughter of Matthew Robinson, of Horton, in Kent, Esq.”