met his Grace at the stair-head, and led us through some apartments furnished in the Venetian manner, into an inner room in quite a different style. There were no chairs, but he desired us to seat ourselves on a sofa, whilst he placed himself on a cushion on the floor, with his legs crossed in the Turkish fashion. A young black slave sat by him, and a venerable old man, with a long beard, served us with coffee. After this collation some aromatic gums were brought, and burnt in a little silver vessel. Mr. Montagu held his nose over the steam for some minutes, and sniffed up the perfume with peculiar satisfaction; he afterwards endeavoured to collect the smoke with his hands, spreading and rubbing it carefully along his beard, which hung in hoary ringlets to his girdle.... We had a great deal of conversation with this venerable looking person, who is, to the last degree, acute, communicative, and entertaining, and in whose discourse and manners are blended the vivacity of a Frenchman with the gravity of a Turk.
Moore does not say that Montagu had assumed the Mohammedan faith, but simply that he considered the Turkish way of life to surpass that of all other nations. Indeed they deserved to be ‘the happiest of mankind,’ if they were, as Montagu held them to be, distinguished for integrity, hospitality, and most other virtues. Egypt was, in his eyes, ‘a perfect paradise,’ to which he was longing to return; and he was convinced that if the Israelites of old could have had their own way they would have stuck to the land and the flesh-pots and driven the Egyptians into Canaan. But he added, with a fine sense of what the occasion required, that ‘it had been otherwise ordered, for wise purposes, of which it did not become us to judge.’
Subsequently Montagu returned the visit of the Duke and his medical guardian. He seated himself on a sofa with his legs drawn up under him, as the most natural and convenient position that a gentleman could take. Moore, in the course of the conversation which ensued, slily adverted to the Mohammedan views with regard to women. The quasi Turk became Oriental to the very ends of his fingers, and grew eloquent on this delicate question. Of course, he defended polygamy and concubinage, even as Solomon had wisely observed it. Women liked neither, and but for this foolish objection they would have had influence enough to have spread Islam as one religion throughout Europe. The men hated Christianity on more valid ground. Auricular confession they abhorred. ‘No Turk of any delicacy would ever allow his wife (particularly if he had but one) to hold private conference with a man on any pretext whatever.’ When the Doctor (for the Duke seems to have been generally silent) insinuated that the Turks had not the same grounds to hate Protestantism, Montagu remarked that the Turks could not tolerate the Christian idea of the equality of women and men, nor accept the Christian view of an exceedingly dull heaven, where the souls of ordinary women were to be assembled, instead of the graceful bodies of Houris, who were to welcome the sons of Islam to a joyous paradise.
The self-exile continued to be the observed of all curious travellers; but he directed his steps at last in the direction of home, if with no decided resolution to return thither. The cause, perhaps, is found in a phrase of a letter from Mrs. Delany, written in February 1776: ‘Mr. Wortley Montagu’s wife is dead.’ This was the laundress, his only legitimate wife, who had married him in his youthful time. Her husband had recently been entertaining Romney, and Romney had painted the portrait of his friend in Turkish costume, which bespeaks the talent of the artist and the sad yet manly beauty of the friend. The latter had been the victim of more lies and jests than any man of his time, and these were multiplied now, but they are not worth repeating. The wanderer himself was near the end of his course. Two months subsequent to his lawful wife’s decease he died, after a brief illness, at Padua. He is said to have expressed a hope that he should die as a good Moslem; but that he was held to have died in the Roman Catholic faith is best proved by the fact that he lies beneath a church roof in Padua, and with a Latin inscription over him, which describes him as ‘ubique civis,’ and which credits him with nearly all the qualities that can dignify humanity. If much eccentricity has been ascribed to him by the world, it is because his acts and words gave some warrant for it. There was scarcely any condition in life but in some country or another he had assumed it. He used to boast that he had never committed a small folly; and his gambling was certainly, at one time, of gigantic proportions. A memoir of him, published in Dublin two years after his death, reckoned among his boyish assumptions those of link-boy, chimney-sweep, and shoe-black! The same veracious volume numbered among his wives, with the English laundress, a Dutch Jewess, a Turkish lady, a Greek girl, a Circassian damsel, and an Arabian maiden. Even to the English laundress he is said to have been married by an official of the Fleet prison. His old tutor, Forster, claimed the merit of having written the work on Ancient Republics, but this claim, made when the author could not answer it, was universally scouted, as was the contemptible pretender. Lady Louisa Stuart, referring to the various ladies who assumed a right to bear his name, remarks:—
More than one lady took the title of his wife, with or without the pretext of a ceremony which, it is to be feared, he would not scruple to go through any number of times, if requisite for the accomplishment of his wishes. But the last person so circumstanced, and the loudest in asserting her claims, met him upon equal ground, having herself a husband living, from whom she had eloped; therefore, she at least could not complain of deception.
The above lady was the ci-devant Miss Dormer. She appeared in London soon after Edward Wortley Montagu’s death; and in her family papers it is stated that she received one hundred pounds annually from Coutts’s out of her alleged husband’s estate. For a long period she resided at Nancy, and she may yet live in the recollection of not very old persons, English and others, who dwelt in that pleasant city in their youth, for the last of the wives of Wortley Montagu survived till January 1821. She lived and died as Countess of Montagu, and her death finally closed a romance of real life, the unfortunate hero of which would probably have won honourable fame if he had been blessed with a mother of a different quality.