CHAPTER III.
In October, Mrs. Montagu was in her town house, in Hill Street, receiving company. Guests of the present day will read, perhaps with a smile of wonder, the following illustration of the times: “The Duke and Duchess of Portland and Lord Titchfield dined with me to-day, and stayed till eight o’clock.”
In the year 1752, there was a subpreceptor to the Prince of Wales, named George Lewis Scott. His baptismal names were those of the King George I., at whose court in Hanover Scott’s father had held some respectable office. The son was recommended for the preceptorship by Bolingbroke to Bathurst, who spoke in the candidate’s favour to the prince’s mother, and the king’s sanction followed. Walpole describes Scott as well-meaning, but inefficient, through undue interference, and as a man of no “orthodox odour, as might be expected of a protégé of Bolingbroke.” Mr. Scott had literary tastes, and occasionally exercised them with credit. Such a man seemed a fitting wooer for Sarah Robinson, Mrs. Montagu’s clever sister. The wooing sped, marriage followed, and separation, from incompatibility of temper, came swiftly on the heels of it. The correspondence throws no light on a dark episode; but in April, 1752, Mrs. Delany wrote to Mrs. Dewes, in reference to Mrs. Scott’s marriage and the separation of herself and husband, the following words: “What a foolish match Mrs. Scott has made for herself. Mrs. Montagu wrote Mrs. Donellan word that she and the rest of her friends had rescued her out of the hands of a very bad man; but, for reasons of interest, they should conceal his misbehaviour as much as possible, but entreated Mrs. Donellan would vindicate her sister’s character whenever she heard it attacked, for she was very innocent.” Perhaps it was the misery that came of this marriage that made Mrs. Montagu conclude a letter from Heys to her husband, during this year, with these words: “Adieu, my dearest, may you find amusement everywhere, but the most perfect happiness with her who is by every grateful and tender sentiment your most affectionate and faithful wife, E. M.” The writer herself could find amusement everywhere. A country-house, well-furnished with books, made Sandleford more agreeable to her than the glories within and the dust without her house in Hill Street. She speaks deliciously of having her writing-table beneath the shade of the Sandleford elms, and she thus pleasantly contrasts country-house employments with the pleasures of reading ancient history, which lightened the burthen of those employments: “To go from the toilet to the senate-house; from the head of a table to the head of an army; or, after making tea for a country justice, to attend the exploits, counsels, and harangues of a Roman consul, gives all the variety the busy find in the bustle of the world, and variety and change (except in a garden) make the happiness of our lives.” She read Hooke’s “Roman History” as an agreeable variety. Her mind was stronger than her body. She was now only thirty-two years of age; and she writes to Gilbert West, that ex-lieutenant of horse, and honest inquirer into theological questions: “You will imagine I am in extraordinary health, when I talk of walking two miles in a morning.” If she could not walk far, she could read and stand anything. In December, she was again at home in Hill Street. On Christmas Eve, 1752, she writes: “I proposed answering my dear Mrs. Boscawen’s letter yesterday, but the Chinese-room was filled by a succession of people from eleven in the morning till eleven at night.”
Early in January, 1753, close upon the anniversary of the death of the brother whom she dearly loved,—her brother “Tom,”—who died a bachelor, in 1748, an event occurred, the bearing of which is only partially told in a letter from Mrs. Montagu to Gilbert West: “My mind was so shocked at my arrival here, that for some days I was insupportably low. I am now better able to attend to the voice of reason and duty. A friendship, begun in infancy, and reunited by our common loss and misfortune, had many tender ties. By tender care I had raised her from despair almost to tranquillity. I had hourly the greatest of pleasures, that of obliging a most grateful person. She made every employment undertaken for me, and every expression of my satisfaction in her execution of those employments, a pleasure. I received from her kind offices, which, however considerable, fell short of the zeal that prompted them. Of this, I do not know that there is a pattern left in the world. She was much endeared, and her loss embittered to me by another consideration, which you may reasonably blame, as it shows too fond an attachment to those things which we ought to resign to the Great Giver; but while she was under my care, I thought a kind of intercourse subsisted between me and a most dear and valuable friend whom I lost this time five years. Whatever I did for her I thought done for that friend on whom my affections, hopes, and pride were placed.”
This little romance having come to a sad conclusion, Mrs. Montagu was soon afterward in town, running, as she said, “from house to house, getting the cold scraps of visiting conversation, served up with the indelicacy and indifference of an ordinary, at which no power of the mind does the honours; the particular taste of each guest is not consulted, the solid part of the entertainment is too gross for a delicate taste, and the lighter fare insipid. Indeed, I do not love fine ladies, but I am to dine with ... to-morrow, notwithstanding.” Again, in November, 1754, she writes from Hill Street, the day after her arrival: “In my town character, I made fifteen visits last night. I should not so suddenly have assumed my great hoop, if I had not desired to pay the earliest respects to Lady Hester Pitt, who is something far beyond a merely fine lady.”
Mrs. Montagu did not seek for friends exclusively among the great. With her and with Lyttelton, intellect was the chief attraction. They both received into their friendship the refugee Bower, who made so much noise in his day. Mrs. Montagu and Lyttelton refused to abandon him when he was assailed by his enemies. When she was told, in a letter from a Roman Catholic, that Bower, the ex-Jesuit whom she had received in her house, was a knave, that his wife was a hussy, and that Mrs. Montagu herself was an obstinate idoliser and a perverse baby for believing in them, she continued her trust, despised report, and asked for facts.
In 1755, Mrs. Montagu affected to detect the first sign of her superannuation in her sudden resolution not to go to Lady Townshend’s ball, though a new pink silver negligée lay ready for the donning. Once, she said, her dear friend, Vanity, could lure her over the Alps or the ocean to a ball like Lady Townshend’s. The day was past since she would have gone eight miles, in winter, to dance to a fiddle, and would have squalled with joy at being upset on her way home. She and Vanity, she thought, had now parted. “I really believe she has left me as lovers do their mistresses, because I was too fond, denied her nothing, and was too compliant to give a piquancy to our commerce.” She was as “sharp” in judging others as herself. Of Lady Essex (the daughter of Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, who married the Earl of Essex in 1754, and died in 1759), Mrs. Montagu, in the intervening year, 1756, says: “Lady Essex coquettes extremely with her own husband, which is very lawful.... She wants to have the bon ton, and we know the bon ton of 1756 is un peu equivoque.”
And now, in the year 1757, the celebrated word “bluestockings” first occurs in Mrs. Montagu’s correspondence. Boswell, under the date 1781, tells us in his “Life of Johnson,” that “about this time, it was much the fashion for several ladies to have evening assemblies, where the fair sex might participate in conversation with literary and ingenious men, animated by a desire to please. These societies were denominated Blue Stocking Clubs. One of the most eminent members of these societies, when they first commenced, was Mr. Benjamin Stillingfleet, whose dress was remarkably grave, and, in particular, it was observed that he wore blue stockings. Such was the excellence of his conversation, that his absence was felt as so great a loss that it used to be said, ‘We can do nothing without the blue stockings,’ and thus, by degrees, the title was established.” Boswell was greatly mistaken, for, in 1781, Benjamin Stillingfleet, the highly accomplished gentleman, philosopher, and barrack-master of Kensington, had been dead ten years, and he had left off wearing blue stockings at least fourteen years before he died. This subject will be referred to in a subsequent page. Meanwhile, in March, 1757, when rumours of war were afloat, Mrs. Montagu gaily wrote to her husband; “If we were in as great danger of being conquered by the Spaniards as by the French, I should not be very anxious about my continuance in the world; but the French are polite to the ladies, and they admire ladies a little in years, so that I expect to be treated with great politeness, and as all laws are suspended during violence, I suppose that you and the rest of the married men will not take anything amiss that happens on the occasion: nor, indeed, should it be a much greater fault than keeping a monkey if one should live with a French marquis for a quarter of a year!” A little later, Walpole told George Montagu a story which illustrates the scandal-power of the period. “I was diverted,” he wrote, “with the story of a lady of your name and a lord whose initial is no further from hers than he himself is supposed to be. Her postilion, a lad of fifteen, said, ‘I’m not such a child but I can guess something! Whenever my Lord Lyttelton comes to my lady, she orders the porter to let in nobody else, and then they call for pen and ink, and say they are going to write history!’ I am persuaded, now that he is parted, that he will forget he is married, and propose himself in form to some woman or other!”
Such scandal as this could not affect either of the parties against whom it was pointed. In the next following years of the reign of George the Second, Mrs. Montagu led her usual life. In London, gay; in the country, busy and thoughtful. “In London,” she asks, “who can think? Perhaps, indeed, they may who are lulled by soft zephyrs through the broken pane, but it cannot happen to ladies in Chinese-rooms!” In those rooms she received all, native and foreign, whose brains or other desirable possessions entitled them to a welcome. At Sandleford, she was sometimes reading a translation of Sophocles, dear to her almost as Shakespeare himself, but as often she was amid accounts relative to firkins of butter, tubs of soap, and chaldrons of coal. When she left the country, it was in the odour of civility; for Mr. and Mrs. Montagu invited a cargo of good folks to dinner, and, like Sir Peter Teazle, left their characters among them to be discussed till the next season. In 1758, Mrs. Montagu became acquainted with Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, the translator of Epictetus; and Mr. Montagu, by the death of a relative, succeeded to the inheritance of rich possessions in the north. Mrs. Montagu thought she had got the richer estate, in the learned lady who had become her friend. Nevertheless, she bore the accession of fortune with hilarious philosophy. “As the gentleman from whom Mr. Montagu inherits had been mad about forty years, and almost bedridden for the last ten, I had always designed to be rather pleased and happy when he resigned his unhappy being and his good estate.” She only fancied there was neither pleasure nor happiness in it, because the “business” appertaining to succession was wearisome.