[9] Means a sedan chair.
Mrs. Montagu had indeed a great deal of trouble at this time, for besides sheltering and endeavouring to cheer Mrs. Scott’s failing spirits, she had, to say nothing of her own constant ill-health, the additional trouble of her favourite brother Jack’s illness, now continuing some months, of a nervous disorder, which he never recovered from.
SOUTH LODGE — THE REV. WILLIAM ROBINSON
On May 26, from Sandleford, Mrs. Montagu writes to Mr. West, who is at her house in Hill Street, attending as clerk to the Privy Council—
“Dear Cousin,
“I was informed by Mrs. Isted[10] that you intended to return to town in the middle of this week, so I imagine that by this time you are in the Empire of China.[11] The leafless trees and barren soil of my landscape will very ill bear comparison with the shady oaks and beautiful verdure of South Lodge, and the grinning Mandarins still worse supply the place of a British Statesman: but as you can improve every society and place into which you enter, I expect such hints from you as will set off the figures, and enliven the landscape with rural beauty. I grieved at the rain from an apprehension that it might interfere with your pleasure at South Lodge. I hope it did not, but that you saw the place with the leisure and attention it deserves; if you give me an account of the parts of it which charmed you most, or of the whole, you will lead my imagination to a very fine place in very good company, and I shall walk over it with great pleasure. I imagine you would feel some poetic enthusiasm in the Temple of Pan, and hope it produced a hymn or ode in which we shall see him knit with the Graces and the Hours to dance, lead on to the Eternal Spring, through groves of your unfading bays.”
South Lodge, Enfield, was then the residence of Mr. Pitt, the grounds of which he laid out with great taste, and designed the Temple of Pan. Mrs. Montagu had recently been on a visit to him here, as will be seen in West’s answer. At the end of a long letter, which contains directions as to the ornaments of her room, comments on her bad health, in which she quotes Pope’s saying, “ill-health is an early old age,” she winds up with regretting that Sir George Lyttelton and Miss West were going to Tunbridge so soon, for “I fear they will leave the place the earlier, as they go at the beginning of the season.” She finishes by commending her brother William, who was to spend a day or two in Hill Street, to West, saying—
“I wrote my advice to him to take this opportunity to pay his respects to you, but possibly a little College awkwardness, added to natural timidity, may prevent his doing it. I assure you he is a very good young man, more I will not say, for having for some years had a mother’s care of him, I have also a mother’s partiality: perhaps you may like him the better for his resemblance to your son.”
[10] Mrs. Isted, Mrs. Montagu’s lady housekeeper.
[11] She was fitting up her big room in Chinese style, and West was assisting her with hints.