[280] The statutes of this Society were dated May 27, 1736. In December Mr. Alex. Gordon wrote, "We are every day increasing both in number and in members either conspicuous for their quality or station, or learning and ingenuity." But constant difficulties arose between the Society and book-sellers. No plan tried proved satisfactory to both parties. By 1765 the finances of the Society were practically exhausted, and in April, 1746, the Society came to an abrupt close, after a starving and not very productive ten years. (Nichols: Anecdotes of Bowyer, pp. 134-38.)
[281] Miss Emily M. Symonds says of the author of the Anecdotes: "Lady Louisa Stuart inherited her grandmother's tastes for literary pursuits. That this taste was discouraged by her family is a real calamity, as all will agree who are familiar with the Selections from her Manuscripts (Essays and Verses), and the Letters to Miss Clinton. Her sketch of the family of John, Duke of Argyll, is a biographical gem, and her youthful letters read as if they had been written by one of Jane Austen's most charming heroines. Her satire is so sweet-tempered that it is evident she likes her victims none the less for her laughter, while her common-sense philosophy, with its sub-acid flavour of gentle cynicism may be studied with advantage even in these enlightened days. A glimpse of Lady Mary's daughter and granddaughter may be obtained from the Diary of Miss Burney, who met the two ladies at Mrs. Delany's in 1787. Lady Bute, she records, with an exterior the most forbidding to strangers, has powers of conversation the most entertaining and lively where she is intimate. She is full of anecdote, delights in strokes of general satire, yet with mere love of comic, not insidious ridicule. She spares not for giving her opinions, and laughs at fools as well as follies, with the shrewdest derision. Lady Louisa Stuart, her youngest daughter, has parts equal to those of her mother, with a deportment and appearance infinitely more pleasing; yet she is far from handsome, but proves how well beauty may be occasionally missed, when understanding and vivacity unite to fill up her place.... They seem both to inherit an ample portion of the wit of their mother and grandmother, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, though I believe them both to have escaped all inheritance of her faults. On the occasion of another and later meeting Miss Burney writes: 'Lady Bute and Lady Louisa were both in such high spirits themselves, that they kept up all the conversation between them with such a vivacity, an acuteness, and an observation on men and manners so clear and so sagacious, that it would be difficult to pass an evening of greater entertainment.'" (Symonds, Emily Morse: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Her Times, p. 537.)
[282] Symonds, Emily Morse: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Her Times, p. 4.
[283] The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Bell, 1887), vol. II, p. 240.
[284] Ibid., LXXVI. Lady Louisa gives the later history of these ponderous black books saying that they survived the wear and tear of a century through the protection of an excellent person who had been Lady Bute's attendant before her marriage, and a part of the family ever after. "Her spectacles were always to be found in Clelia and Cassandra, which she studied unceasingly six days of the week, prizing them next to the Bible and Tillotson's Sermons; because, to give her own words, they were all about good and virtuous people, not like the wicked trash she now saw young people get from the circulating libraries."
[285] Symonds: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Her Times, p. 7.
[286] Spence's Anecdotes, by Singer (Ed. 1820), p. 232.
[287] Montagu, Lady Mary: Works, vol. I, p. 40.
[288] Ibid., vol. II, p. 403.
[289] Montagu, Lady Mary: Works, vol. II, p. 5.