We may follow them to Ranelagh, where they saunter lackadaisically, indifferent to the crowd and the fireworks, Mrs. Vesey uttering ‘gentle, amiable, elegant sentiments in a tone of voice that was originally intended for a Cherub.’ But the exposure was apparently too much for the tender frame of Yorick. In listening to Mrs. Vesey’s voice, he lost his own, and now ‘colds, coughs, and catarrhs’ have so tied up his tongue that he can no longer whisper loud enough to explain Vesey’s effect upon his heart. How often thereafter he was able to becassock himself and sit in the warm blue drawing-room listening to the music, we do not know. The romance did not last long, certainly; and we hear nothing more of it after the autumn of 1767, when Mrs. Vesey invited Sterne to visit her in Ireland, an invitation which his illness compelled him to decline.
Like the French ladies described by Sterne in the Sentimental Journey, Mrs. Vesey turned, at a certain age, to agnosticism. Mrs. Montagu had defied Voltaire, but Mrs. Vesey courted the Abbé Raynal. He responded with great vivacity and was often in her drawing-room during the year 1777. Mrs. Boscawen asserts[277] that she once heard him talk for eight hours ‘successfully’ and without interruption: ‘One must have heard and seen it to believe it;’ and Mrs. Chapone asserts that he talked steadily from one at noon till one in the morning.[278] This particular conversation, however, did not occur at Mrs. Vesey’s. She would never have permitted any one thus to turn conversation into a lecture.
Mrs. Vesey’s interest in French agnosticism caused her friends grave concern. Twice Mrs. Carter denounced Voltaire when Mrs. Vesey demanded a pronouncement on his works, and at last wrote that she would as soon think of playing with toads and vipers, as of reading such blasphemy and impiety.[279] She argued for the validity of revealed religion, but without great effect, for Mrs. Vesey continued to play with fire. She produced strange romantic thrills in herself by reading the Abbé Raynal during a violent thunderstorm. Byron, surely, could have understood this, but it was beyond the blues. ‘’Tis a dangerous amusement to a mind like yours, indeed to any mind,’ wrote Mrs. Carter. But dangerous or not, it illustrates the curiosity of Mrs. Vesey’s mind, and might furnish a historian of the Romantic Movement with an apt anecdote.
Because of the unpretentiousness of her character, Mrs. Vesey has always been ranked far below Mrs. Montagu, but it may be doubted whether the estimate is quite fair. There were many who found her assemblies more agreeable[280] than Mrs. Montagu’s more pretentious parties, especially after that lady’s removal to Portman Square. Unlike Mrs. Montagu, she made no attempt to produce literature herself (and for this posterity should be grateful); but she appears to have had an instinctive appreciation, not surpassed by the other, of the true function of the salon. For it was the office of the bluestockings neither to reform the whole of London society by giving it a literary tone, nor to bring into existence a new school of authors dominated by their ideals; but rather to keep in motion, by means of social intercourse, the currents of thought, literary and philosophical. A true conversazione can create and vitalize a train of ideas, and Mrs. Vesey, with her broad and genial interests, was able to assemble the best representatives of the new ideas, and bring them into contact with society. This, if there be any, is the true office of the bluestocking, an office which Mrs. Vesey discharged with skill and with charm.
About Mrs. Montagu and Mrs. Vesey there revolved other luminaries. Certain of them—Elizabeth Carter, Hester Chapone, Hannah More, and Fanny Burney—though they presided over no salon, achieved an independent reputation as authors, and will therefore be considered in later chapters. Others of them—as Miss Monckton (still remembered for Reynolds’s sentimental portrait of her), Lady Lucan, Lady Herries, Mrs. Greville, the admirable Mrs. Cholmondeley (niece of Walpole and friend of Miss Burney), and the sensible Mrs. Walsingham—have left, in general, little more than a name (and an adjective) to posterity. Others, who are more often encountered, demand a brief consideration.
There is, for example, the gracious figure of Mrs. Boscawen,[281] wife of the Admiral, and one of the best-loved women in London. Boswell’s compliment to her will be familiar to students of the Life of Johnson: ‘If it be not presumptuous in me to praise her, I would say that her manners are the most agreeable and her conversation the best of any lady with whom I ever had the happiness to be acquainted.’[282] Miss More described her parties in the words of Madame de Sévigné as ‘all daffodil, all rose, all jonquil,’ and dwelt on her power to make each of her guests feel that he had been the immediate object of her attention.[283]
Her reputation was thus always rather social than literary.[284] Her letters, indeed, were highly regarded by her friends, and were sometimes preferred to Mrs. Montagu’s—a preference by no means audacious. The repeated comparison with Madame de Sévigné is certainly less happy. Mrs. Boscawen’s letters, as preserved in Mrs. Delany’s Autobiography and the Memoirs of Hannah More, have the affectionate intimacy but not the kindling wit and sprightliness which distinguish familiar correspondence at its best. It is sufficient to say of these letters that they have successfully preserved Mrs. Boscawen’s pleasant personality.
Mrs. Boscawen emulated Mrs. Montagu as a patron of rising young authors by entering into warm personal relations with Hannah More. They first became intimate when, on the twelfth night of Percy, Mrs. Boscawen sent the successful dramatist a wreath of myrtle, laurel, and bay. This stimulated the young lady to an exhibition of that flattery for which she was already famous. In an Ode to the Hon. Mrs. Boscawen, Apollo himself is made to rebuke Hannah for wearing these floral honours, asserting that it is for Mrs. Boscawen that