Delany too is ours; serenely bright,
Wisdom’s strong ray, and virtue’s milder light:
And she who blessed the friend and graced the lays
Of poignant Swift, still gilds my social days;
Long, long protract thy light, O star benign!
Whose setting beams with milder lustre shine.
But Mrs. Delany seldom allowed her lustre to shine upon the salon, and was anything but mild in her opinion of Mrs. Montagu’s assemblies. She was more interested in the Royal Family than in the progress of literature, and despite her early associations, preferred the society of rank to that of genius. She was graciously pleased when Garrick received her friend the Duchess of Portland and herself ‘very respectfully,’ and showed himself ‘sensible of the honour’ done him.[306] She was vexed that Mason’s tepid tragedy, Elfrida, should be ‘prostituted’ by a public performance, and ‘the charms of virgins represented by the abandoned nymphs of Drury Lane.’ ‘Such a poem,’ she continues, ‘would have been represented in days of yore by the youthful part of the Royal family or those of the first rank. Indeed, in these our days (save our own Royal Family), it would be difficult to find representatives suited to such virtuous and refined characters.’[307] Such a person, who was for ever protesting that she was in love with the King, the Queen, and the whole Royal Family,[308] was in no position to mediate properly between authors and ‘the Great.’ Her one conception of serving them was to render them up, a living sacrifice, to the Royal Family, as Miss Burney (who was dazzled by the friend of Swift and the friend of the Queen) discovered to her cost. When Miss Burney hesitated to enter upon her service as Dresser to Queen Charlotte—a post which her intimacy with Mrs. Delany had brought her—it was Mrs. Delany who was ‘much mortified’ that so flattering a proposal could cause a moment’s hesitation.[309]
Mrs. Delany is a significant figure in the history of the salon by virtue of the fascination which she exercised through her quondam connection with a great man; but of genuine interest in the salon she had little, and of influence upon the course of literature none at all.
Alone among the literary ladies of the age, Mrs. Thrale has retained the fascination which she exercised in her own time. The fame of the other bluestockings has gone from less to less; but hers has remained constant, if indeed it has not increased. This is of significance, for it shows either that she was more modern than her sisters or more universal. She might consistently have aspired to the title, ‘Queen of the Bluestockings,’ but she did not even care whether she was reckoned one of them, contenting herself with outwitting them at every point. It was she, for example, who captured the two authors most coveted by the mistresses of the salons, Johnson and Miss Burney, and ‘planted’ them in her house.[310] Her friendship with the former, though it cannot be shown to have altered the course of his works, gave birth to an admirable series of familiar letters, which Hannah More found ‘true letters of friendship which are meant to show kindness rather than wit.’[311] But more important than such published results was the fame which Johnson lent to Mrs. Thrale by his residence at her home. The nearest approach to the true salon that we find in the eighteenth century in England is the dining-room at Streatham; the spectacle of Johnson there reading aloud from the proof-sheets of the Lives of the Poets is in exact accord with the best French traditions of the salon.