When she found herself among the great coal-owners, she was neither happy nor pleased. They could only talk of coal, and of those who had been made or ruined by it. “As my mind is not naturally set to this tune,” she wrote to Mr. Benjamin Stillingfleet, “I should often be glad to change it for a song from one of your Welsh bards.” She, however, intended to turn the occasion to intellectual profit by exploring the country, and studying its beauties and natural productions, but a little fainting fit put an end to this design. An overzealous maid went to her aid, when fainting, with a bottle of eau-de-luce, but as she emptied the contents into Mrs. Montagu’s throat, instead of applying it outwardly for refreshment, the lady was nigh upon being then and there deprived of upwards of forty years of life. She happily recovered, and by and by she speaks of herself, in London, as “going wherever two or three fools were gathered together, to assemblies, visiting-days etc. Twenty-four idle hours, without a leisure one among them!” So she said; but an order to Mrs. Denoyer, at the Golden Bible, Lisle Street, for a hundred of the best pens and half a ream of the finest and thinnest quarto paper, indicates how many hours of the twenty-four were employed. She thought, or she affected to think, that she grew idler as she grew older. In one of her letters to old Doctor Monsey,—a grotesque savage and scholar, who, in lugubrious jokery, wrote love-letters (which she pretended to take seriously) at fourscore,—she said, in September, 1757, just before her thirty-seventh birthday: “I shall write to you again when I am thirty-seven; but I am now engaged in a sort of death-bed repentance for the idleness of the thirty-sixth year of my age!” She certainly took a wrong view of her case when she further said: “Having spent the first part of my life in female vanities, the rest in domestic employments, I seem as if I had been measuring ribbons in a milliner’s, or counting pennyworths of figs and weighing sugar-candy in a grocer’s shop all my life.” This was no affectation. “If you envy me,” she added, “or know any one who does, pray tell them this sad truth. Nothing can be more sad. Nothing can be more true.”
It would have been sad, if it had been true; but she was severe in her own censure. If she cheerfully plunged into the vortex of fashionable duties, she persistently proclaimed her higher enjoyment of home privileges. She sneered at her own presence wherever two or three fools were gathered together, but her honest ambition was to establish friendships with the wise and the virtuous. Johnson assured her of her “goodness so conspicuous,” and was proud of being asked to use his influence to obtain her support of poor Mrs. Ogle’s benefit concert, as it gratified his vanity that he should be “supposed to be of any importance to Mrs. Montagu.” With respect, at this time, for Johnson, she had a deeper feeling of regard for Burke. “Mr. Burke, a friend of mine.” There is reasonable pride in the assertion, and how tenderly and cleverly she paints her “friend!”—“He is, in conversation and writing, an ingenious and ingenuous man, modest and delicate, and on great and serious subjects full of that respect and veneration which a good mind, and a great one, is sure to feel; he is as good and worthy as he is ingenious.” Her love of books was like her love of friends. Dressed for a ball, she sat down, read through the “Ajax” and the “Philoctetes” of Sophocles, wrote a long critical letter on the two dramas, and, losing her ball, earned her bed and the deep sleep she enjoyed in it. At Tunbridge, she describes the occupation of a single morning as consisting of going to chapel, then to a philosophical lecture, next to hear a gentleman play the viol d’amore, and finally to hold controversy with a Jew and a Quaker. In 1760, she was equally vivacious, in “sad Newcastle.” In September of that year, she writes to Lord Lyttelton, that she was taking up her freedom, by entering into all the diversions of the place. “I was at a musical entertainment yesterday morning, at a concert last night, at a musical entertainment this morning; I have bespoken a play for to-morrow night, and shall go to a ball, on choosing a mayor, on Monday night.” But in the hours of leisure, between these dissipations, she fulfilled all her duties as a woman of business in connection with her steward’s accounts and the coal interests, and devoted the remainder to the study of works in the loftiest walks of literature. “More leisure and fewer hours,” she says, “had possibly made me happier, but my business is to make the best of things as they are.” She ever made the best of two old and wise men who professed, in mirth, to make love to her in all seriousness. The two wise men look, in their correspondence, like two fools. Lord Bath, the wiser of the two, looks more of a fool than Doctor Monsey, and there is something nauseous in the affected playfulness of the aged lovers, and also in the equally affected virginal coyness with which Mrs. Montagu received, encouraged, or put aside their rather audacious gallantry. Her part in these pseudo love-passages was born of her charity. It gave the two old friends pleasure (Lord Lyttelton himself styled her Ma Donna), and it did no harm to the good-natured lady. Lord Bath, however, is not to be compared with such a buffoon as Monsey. His honest opinion of Mrs. Montagu was, that there never was and never would be a more perfect being created than that lady. And Burke said that the praise was not too highly piled.
It was at this period that Mrs. Montagu first appeared as an authoress, but anonymously. Of the “Dialogues of the Dead,” published under Lord Lyttelton’s name, she supplied three. They are creditable to her, and are not inferior to those by my lord, which have been sharply criticised, under the name of “Dead Dialogues,” by Walpole. In “Cadmus and Mercury,” the lady shows that strength of mind, properly applied, is better than strength of body. There is great display of learning; Hercules, however, talks like gentle Gilbert West; and Cadmus, when he says that “actions should be valued by their utility rather than their éclat,” shows a knowledge of French which was hardly to be expected in him.
If we are surprised at the cleverness of Cadmus, in speaking French, we cannot but wonder at the ignorance of Mercury, in the next dialogue, with a modern fine lady, in not knowing the meaning of bon ton. But the lady’s description of it is as good as anything in the comedy of the day. As for the manners of the period, as far as they regard husbands, wives, and children, their shortcomings are described with a hand that is highly effective, if not quite masterly.
Mrs. Montagu seems to think that Ici on parle Français might be posted upon the banks of the Styx; for, in the dialogue between Plutarch, Charon, and a modern bookseller, the first alludes to finesse, and the second refers to the friseur of Tisiphone. But Plutarch had met M. Scuderi in the Shades! On the other hand, he had never heard of Richardson or Fielding! Nevertheless, the criticisms on modern fiction and modern vices are, if not ringing with wit, full of good sense and fine satire. They could only have come from one who had not merely read much, but who had thought more: one who had not only studied the life and society of which she was a part, but who could put a finger on the disease and also point out the remedy.
The first and last dialogues are enriched by remarks which are the result of very extensive reading. That between Mercury and the modern fine lady abounds in proofs of the writer’s observation, and consequently of illustrations of contemporary social life. The lady pleads her many engagements, in bar to the summons of Mercury to cross the Styx. These are not engagements to husband and children, but to the play on Mondays, balls on Tuesdays, the opera on Saturdays, and to card assemblies the rest of the week, for two months to come. She had indeed found pleasure weary her when the novelty had worn off; but “my friends,” she says, “always told me diversions were necessary, and my doctor assured me dissipation was good for my spirits. My husband insisted that it was not; and you know that one loves to oblige one’s friends, comply with one’s doctor, and contradict one’s husband.” She will, however, willingly accompany Mercury, if he will only wait for her till the end of the season. “Perhaps the Elysian fields may be less detestable than the country in our world. Pray have you a fine Vauxhall and Ranelagh? I think I should not dislike drinking the Lethe waters when you have a full season.” This fine lady has not been destitute of good works. “As to the education of my daughters, I spared no expense. They had a dancing-master, a music-master, and a drawing-master, and a French governess to teach them behaviour and the French language.” No wonder that Mercury sneered at the fact that the religion, sentiment, and manners of those young ladies were to be learnt “from a dancing-master, music-master, and a chambermaid.” As to the last, there soon came in less likely teachers of French to young ladies than French chambermaids. General Burgoyne makes his Miss Allscrip (in “The Heiress,” a comedy first played in 1786) remark: “We have young ladies, you know, Blandish, boarded and educated, upon blue boards in gold letters, in every village; with a strolling player for a dancing-master, and a deserter from Dunkirk to teach the French grammar.”
The dialogues had a great success. The three avowedly “by another hand” interested the public, as the circumstance gave them a riddle to be solved in their leisure hours. They were attributed to men of such fine intellect that Mrs. Montagu had every reason to be delighted at such an indirect compliment.
If her own account is to be taken literally, she had now, at forty, assumed gravity as a grace and an adornment. In 1761, she wrote to Mrs. Elizabeth Carter that, whether in London or in the country, “I am become one of the most reasonable, quiet, good kind of country gentlewoman that ever was.” And she closes another letter to the same lady, in September of the same year, with the observation,—made when she was only forty-one, and had but just accomplished half of a career of which she was already tired,—“I will own I often feel myself so weary of my journey through this world, as to wish for more rest, a quiet Sabbath after my working days; but when such time shall come, perhaps some painful infirmity may find my virtue employment; but all this I leave to Him who knows what is best.”
While the writer was recording this wish and making this reflection, all England was in a frenzy of exultation at the accession of the young king, George III., and all London in feverish excitement at the coming of a young queen. When, so to speak, the uproar of festival and congratulation culminated at the coronation of the young royal couple, the lady who was weary of life and sighed for a Sabboth of rest, got into a coach at Fulham at half-past four on an October morning, and was driven to Lambeth. With her gay company she was rowed across the river from Lambeth to the cofferer’s office, whence she saw the procession go and return, between Westminster Hall and the Abbey, and owned that it exceeded her expectations. The return to the Hall was made, however, in the dark; and, under shadow of night, the Montagu party were rowed to York Buildings, where a carriage waited to take them to Fulham. The lady, stirred by a new sensation, which was followed by neither fatigue nor indisposition, seemed to have resumed the spirit of the nymph who used to take headers into the Mary-le-bone Gardens plunging-bath, and to be complimented, on her daring, in ballads, by Lord Dupplin!