It surprised her friends that one so fragile in appearance, who looked as though a breath of wind might blow her away, should be equal to the fatigues of a worldly existence. Hannah More, when first she knew her, had described her as “hastening to insensible decay by a slow but sure hectic.” Twenty years after, on one of her brief visits to town, she found her hectic patient (aged seventy-six) “well, bright, and in full song,” The excitement afforded by mixing with the giddy world had long since wearied and sickened the worthy Hannah, but to the mistress of Montagu House it had become a necessity. Without it she would have moped. She resigned her sceptre gradually and reluctantly. Sir Nathaniel Wraxall alludes in a rather malicious tone to the splendor of her attire, when in extreme old age, and especially to the quantity of diamonds that flashed on head, neck, arms, and fingers. “I used to think,” he says, “that these glittering appendages of opulence sometimes helped to dazzle the disputant whom her arguments might not always convince, or her literary reputation intimidate.” At length failing strength obliged her to retire from a scene in which she had long shone the brightest star, and we hear of her less and less. She died in 1800, aged eighty.
The gap left by her in society has never been exactly filled—except possibly by Lady Blessington, who was a far shallower person than her predecessor, with sympathies less exclusively literary. The kindness Mrs. Montagu showed to struggling authors, and the assistance she lent them in time of need, are pleasant to remember. It was to her influence in a great measure, that Beattie owed the success of his “Minstrel,” and Hannah More that of her windy play “Percy.” She condescended to notice the humblest efforts—like those, for instance, of Mrs. Yearsley, the ungrateful milk-woman of Bristol, in whose poetical effusions she discovered a surprising “force of imagination and harmony of numbers.”
The literary salon, properly so called, appears to be a thing of the past. Society is now too large, and time too precious, to admit of its revival. Besides, workers in literature appeal to a discerning public, and not to individual patrons and patronesses, for support. Even if such a revival were possible, a leader like Mrs. Montagu could hardly be found. It was Johnson himself who said of her:
“She exerts more mind in conversation than any person I ever met with; she displays such powers of ratiocination, such radiations of intellectual excellence, as are amazing.”
This is strong praise, and it agrees with the opinions of others hardly less celebrated. There are few, it would seem, at the present day, of whom the same could, with truth, be said.—Temple Bar.
GENERAL GORDON AND THE SLAVE TRADE.
In an article in the Fortnightly Review for the month of October,[46] under the heading of “The Future of the Soudan,” grave charges are made against General Gordon.
It is alleged in that article that General Gordon’s proclamation at Khartoum, of the 18th or 19th of February last, will have a very injurious effect upon the condition of thousands of unhappy negroes from the upper regions of the Nile, who are, or will become, slaves. That General Gordon has undone by his own hands the work he devoted years of his life to accomplish. That his proclamation to the slaveholders showed that he was inclined to temporize with an injustice, and that the English Government have confirmed the right of man to sell man. It is further asserted that the issue of the proclamation secured General Gordon’s safe arrival at Khartoum.