Mrs. Montagu joyfully promises her support.
The rest of the blues were hardly less enthusiastic. Old Mrs. Delany circulated the milk-woman’s ‘proposals’ to print;[400] Mrs. Boscawen sent in a ‘handsome list of subscribers’; the Duchess of Beaufort requested a visit from Mrs. Yearsley; the Duchess of Portland sent a twenty-pound bank-note. Walpole gave her money and the works of Hannah More.[401] The Duchess of Devonshire presented her with an edition of the English poets. All social London and half of literary London put its name on the list of subscribers. When, in 1785, the volume appeared, it was prefaced by a letter from Hannah More to Mrs. Montagu, telling Mrs. Yearsley’s story, and recommending her to the good attentions of Mrs. Montagu, whose delight ‘in protecting real genius’ is well known. Mrs. Montagu’s name was, indeed, writ large in the volume. In the address, To Stella (Stella being the milk-woman’s name for Hannah More), Mrs. Montagu is referred to as
That bright fair who decks a Shakespeare’s urn
With deathless glories.
Similar adulation is diffused through some seventy lines of a blank verse poem, On Mrs. Montagu. A passage from this will serve as well as anything to illustrate ‘Lactilla’s’ powers:
Lo! where she, mounting, spurns the stedfast earth,
And, sailing on the cloud of science, bears
The banner of Perfection.—
Ask Gallia’s mimic sons how strong her powers,
Whom, flush’d with plunder from her Shakespeare’s page,