“Last night in the middle of the dancing we drank tea with a gentleman who had invited about twenty of us some days before. They give tea now almost as much of common days as they used to do on Sundays.”
[299] Afterwards Earl of Chatham.
[300] Richard Nash, for fifty years Master of the Ceremonies, Bath.
Sarah says she is going to play shuttlecock with a Mr. Amiens,[301] at the end of this letter; and in the next she states—
“I played at Shuttlecock about half an hour, there were five couple of us: in truth I played so much better than any in the room, I put them all in amazement, but it was rather owing to their bad play, and to my being matched with the two men that played the best, than my superior skill.... In my last I mentioned I was going to the ball: there was a table of sweetmeats, jellies, wine, Biskets, cold Ham and Turkey set behind two Screens, which at 9 o’clock were taken away, and the table discovered.... Above stairs there was a hot supper for all that would take the trouble to go up.”
[301] I think this was Mr. Amyand?
“MATHEMATICAL INSTERATION!”
The ignorance of some ladies of this period is shown by Sarah in the following extract:—
“A lady told us last night that Miss Molyneux is so great a Mathematician that she can inster Greek, and that often a dozen of the most learned men of the Kingdom had puzzled their wise heads about a piece of Greek, and could make nothing of it; they proposed to send it to Miss Molyneux, and she instered it (alias construed it), and returned them her insteration!”
Whilst Sarah was at Bath, Mrs. Montagu wrote frequently to her mother at Mount Morris, much, naturally enough, about her child, about whom the fond grandmother was never tired of hearing. A little sentence gives a clue to his looks, “If my Father has drawn a blue-eyed simpering Cherubim, you may fancy him not unlike your grandchild; the child’s eyelashes are black and long, and he has a laughing look in his eyes, blue, like my Father.” He was still toothless, and suffered much with his gums, which made his mother already uneasy. Mr. Montagu had just taken some prodigious sized carp from a fish-pond at Sandleford, and was throwing three of the old monks’ ponds, or fish stews, into one large one.