To her niece. “Portman Square, December 31, 1789. ... The kind of life one leads at Bath, tho’ it offers but few amusements, allows no leisure. Sauntering is the business of the place. Beaux in boots, and misses in great coats, visit all the morning, and, having nothing better to do themselves, will not suffer others to do anything that is better. My evenings are always agreably engaged with my friends. The Bath is chiefly fill’d with Irish, but there were many persons there with whom I live in a great degree of intimacy when in London. I had the pleasure of finding and leaving the primate and Sir William Robinson in perfect health. I expect his grace will be in town in a few days. Sir William will remain at Bath and pursue the warm bathing, which he finds very beneficial.
“... My nephew Robinson was so good as to be with me at Bath.... I came to town yesterday sennight. The cold lodging-houses at Bath, and the chill journey, made me feel myself wonderfully comfortable in this good and substantial mansion. Ever since I first inhabited it, I have been sensible how much a good habitation softens the severity and enlivens the gloom of winter.
“Montagu is gone to Lord Harrowby’s to spend ye holydays. He acquitted himself admirably of all his devoirs at Bath. He danced as many minouets, caper’d as many cotillions, and skipp’d as many country-dances as any young gentleman at ye place. He usually open’d the ball, and danc’d to the last. Indeed, with a great deal of prudence and discretion, he has as lively, gay spirits as any one I ever knew; so, he is happy at all times and in all places, and makes those who are with him so.
“... We all imagine Mr. Pitt will have little to fear from the opposition. I do not hear any news. It would be doing too much honour to ye slanders of the newspapers to contradict them.
“... You did my letters undeserved honour in taking the trouble to copy them. As I am arrived at an age to look back on my past life with more pleasure, perhaps, than to future expectations, I have found some satisfaction in the recollection of former days, which letters then written present to the mind in a more distinct and lively manner than memory can do. Whatever gave one great joy or great grief, leaves strong marks on the mind, but the soft, gentle pleasures, like ye annual flowers in a garden, pass away with ye season, unless thus preserved.” These reflections denote the way whither this Lady of the Last Century was going. Hannah More, noted, in 1790, the change that had come over the old order of things. In April, she chronicles, indeed, “a pleasant party,” at Mrs. Montagu’s, including Burke, “a sufficiently pleasant party of himself,” and Mackenzie, “the man of feeling;” but she also adds, “the old little parties are not to be had in the usual style of comfort. Everything is great, and vast, and late, and magnificent, and dull.” Wilberforce, too, was one of the welcome guests, and so intimate, that Mrs. Montagu called him by a pseudonym “the Red Cross Knight.” But the splendid stage, the superb style, the pillars of verd antique, the room of feathers, these could not compensate for the less showy, but more real, delights of the old Bluestocking days in Hill Street. But the lady of the house had still the same inexhaustible spirits, the same taste for business and magnificence. Three or four great dinners in a week with Luxembourgs, Montmorencies, and Czartoriskis. “I had rather,” said the sage Hannah, “for my part, live in our cottage at Cheddar. She is made for the great world, and is an ornament to it. It is an element she was born to breathe in.”
Hannah More’s duties were consistent with cottage life; but Mrs. Montagu held her fortune in trust, and spent it in gratifications, the cost of which made glad hearts in a hundred homes. At some of her assemblies, eccentric as well as intellectual people seem now to have been admitted. Miss Burney notes, in 1792, having encountered at Montagu House “a commonish, non-nothingish sort of a half good-humoured and sensibilish woman!” Soon, however, increasing infirmities weakened Mrs. Montagu’s powers and affected her spirits. But she who was, as Fanny Burney said, so “magnificently useful” in her generation, kept up her magnificence and tried to maintain her usefulness to the last. Her supreme effort to get together the little comfortable, intellectual parties that delighted Hannah More, was made in 1798. “I have been at one bit of Blue there,” wrote Doctor Burney to his daughter. “Mrs. Montagu is so broken down as not to go out. She is almost wholly blind and very feeble.”
In the succeeding year, Mrs. Carter wrote to Hannah More: “... She has totally changed her mode of life, from a conviction that she exerted herself too much last year, and that it brought on the long illness, by which she suffered so much.... She never goes out except to take the air of a morning; has no company to dinner (I do not call myself company); lets in nobody in the evening, which she passes in hearing her servant read, as her eyes will not suffer her to read herself.” Mrs. Carter hopes that “a taste for the comfort of living quietly will, for the future, prevent her from mixing so much with the tumults of the world as to injure her health.”
Her interest in the education of girls was not affected by her decaying powers. After Mrs. Hannah More had published her celebrated work on that subject, and it had been read to Mrs. Montagu, the latter wrote to the author a letter, in which is the following passage: “Sandleford, May, 1799. You have most judiciously pointed out the errors of modern education, which seems calculated entirely to qualify young women for whatever their godfathers and godmothers had renounced for them at their baptism; and what is most shocking is, that a virtuous matron and tender mother values herself much on not having omitted anything that can fit her daughter for the world, the flesh, and the devil.” This was the final judgment of a lady who, in her own girlhood, had expressed herself in much the same terms, and who, later in life, had laid it down as a law for her own niece, that to dance a minuet well was of more importance than to have a knowledge of a foreign language. She had escaped perils herself, because she was always occupied. If, when a nymph, she so sported in the Mary-le-bone waters, that lords wrote sonnets on her, she forgot the homage in her higher enjoyments of native and foreign literature. If she went joyously any number of miles to a ball, danced with the very love of dancing, and shrieked with delight at being upset on her way home, the next day she had purer enjoyment in reading, analysing, and judging a translation of a Greek play or a volume of ancient or modern history. She did not despise being attractive, but she dressed her mind even more carefully than she did her person. As she grew in years she was as ready for increasing duties as for increasing delights, and looked as fascinating among her Berkshire farm-servants and her Northumbrian pitmen as she did, blazing with diamonds and lively spirits, in the throne-room at St. James’s. She never had a fool for an acquaintance, nor ever an idle hour in the sense of idleness. Mistress of an ample fortune, she lived up to her income, and never beyond it. All around her profited by such stewardship. She is said to have done all things with a grace, and most things with ease. It was not more difficult for her to vanquish Voltaire than to make a grouse-pie for Garrick. When she passed to her rest, in 1800, she was prepared to go that way thankfully. Some few of her acquaintances dwelt, as such candid persons will, upon her little faults. But there was one good woman who remembered only her great merits. “With Mrs. Montagu’s faults,” wrote Hannah More to Doctor Whalley, in 1808, “I have nothing to do. Her fine qualities were many. From my first entrance into a London life till her death, I ever found her an affectionate, zealous, and constant friend, as well as a most instructive and pleasant companion. Her youth and beauty were gone long before I knew her.”
But even in the days of her maidenhood, when she was glad in her youth and in her beauty, and conscious of her intellect, yet unconscious of the pleasures, duties, and trials before her, yet when she feared she might live idle and die vain, she said, “If ever I have an inscription over me, it shall be without a name, and only,—Here lies one whom, having done no harm, no one should censure; and, having done no good, no one can commend; who, for past folly, only asks oblivion.” She lived, however, to do much good, to make great amends for small and venial follies, and by the magnificent usefulness, which Little Burney has recorded, to merit such pains as it may cost a poor chronicler to rescue her name and deeds from the oblivion which she asked in the pleasant days of her bright youth and her subduing beauty.