[263] Diary of Madame D’Arblay 2. 234.
[264] Her letters, with the exception of a lively but rather incoherent note to Hannah More, have not been published. Lord Lyttelton wrote to Garrick: ‘You will be charmed (as I am) with the lively colouring and fine touches in the epistolary style of our sylph, joined to the most perfect ease. Mrs. Montagu’s letters are superior to her in nothing but force and compass of thought.’ Garrick, Correspondence 1. 440; 12 October 1771.
[265] Series of Letters 4. 6.
[266] Ib. 4. 83.
[267] Ib. 4. 354.
[268] Letters to Mrs. Montagu 1. 335.
[269] Diary 1. 253-54.
[270] Letters 9. 152; 24 January 1775: ‘The Cophthi were an Egyptian race, of whom nobody knows anything but the learned; and thence I gave Mrs. Montagu’s academies the name of Coptic.’
[271] Johnson, Walpole, Goldsmith, Burke, Reynolds, Boswell, Garrick, Sterne, General Potemkin, General Paoli, General Oglethorpe, half a dozen bishops, and all the blues were at various times among her guests. Of one of her entertainments, Hannah More wrote: ‘She had collected her party from the Baltic to the Po, for there was a Russian nobleman, an Italian virtuoso, and General Paoli.’ Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 212.
[272] Series of Letters 3. 323.