BOOKS.

LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGII.0

Tux literature of the Queen Anne age and of the early Georgian period has an irresistible attraction for many readers. That literature, indeed, is by no means of a highly elevated character. Much of it is eminently artificial, the production of great wits rather than of great poets, of men whose ideas of life were gained in the narrow circle of the town, and whose knowledge of Nature was almost wholly gleaned from books. The creative imagina- tion of the Elizabethan poets and their enchanting voice of song had died out, and instead of these rare gifts of poetry, the town listened to the consummate satire and scandal of Pope, to the graceful were de sociae of Prior, to the coarse and easy rhymes of Swift, and in exchange for Shakespeare's style—" the style," in Pope's judgment, " of a bad age "—the wits at the play- houses had for their delectation the Cato of Addison and the Reggaes Opera of Gay.

It was essentially a coarse age, and distinguished statesmen, as well as high-born ladies, lived grossly and used the language of Billingsgate. Queen Anne is said to have reproved the Earl of Oxford for often coming into her presence drank. Swift on one occasion would not go to a Cabinet dinner, saying that all the Ministers would become intoxicated ; and among Swift's best female friends was the mistress of the King and Lady Betty Germaine, who, according to the Duchess of Marlborough, got into trouble in her youth, and covered her irregularities by a subsequent marriage. Intrigues, indeed, were frequent among ladies of quality, and one of Lady Mary Wortley Montage's greatest friends was "dear Molly Skerritt," the mistress, and afterwards the wife, of Sir Robert Walpole.

Lady Mary belonged to her age. Her father, the Duke of Kingston, was a man of pleasure, and his children were left to the care of inferiors. The cleverest woman of her time may be said to have been self-educated. There was a large library in her father's house, and she was allowed to browse in it at will. She read everything, and became familiar with the ponderous romances which testify to the patience of our ancestors. More- over, she taught herself Latin, and among other accomplish- ments, talked so well when a girl of fourteen as to attract her future husband, a man very much older. The story of the courtship, which began several years later, and ended in an elopement, is singularly free from romance. Every- thing was arranged in the most businesslike style, and love did not in LadyMary's case run away with reason. She shall come to him, she writes to Wortley, only in a gown and petticoats, and that is all he will get with her ; but she adds:—"'Tie something odd for a woman that brings nothing to expect anything, but after the way of my education, I dare not pretend to live but in some degree suitable to it. I had rather die than return to a depen- dency upon relations I have disobliged. Save me from that fear if you love me. If you cannot, or think I ought not to expect it, be sincere and tell me so. 'Tie better I should not be yours at all, than for a short happiness involve myself in ages of misery." That she loved him at this time is evident, though the love is oddly expressed :—" I have examined my own heart whether I can leave everything for you : I think I can : if I change my mind, you shall know before Sunday." All the world knows that the marriage was far from being a happy one. Wortley was not in any definite form an unkind husband ; but even in the early months following the honeymoon, be seems to have neglected his wife. She cries out

• The Letter& and Werke of With Mary Wortley Montagu. Edited by her Great Grandson, Lord Wherneliffe. With Additions and a Memoir by W. Moy Thomas. new Edition, Revised, 2 vela, London George Bell and Bone. 1887.

that she is left alone, that he forgets to write, that he leaves her letters unanswered, and that she is full of fears for him that "proceed from an unlimited love." A good man, one might think, would have made a good wife of Lady Mary ; but there seems to have been but a slight response on Wortley's part to a thousand womanly appeals, and in the end she became as indifferent as her husband. There was never any quarrel, but Lady Mary found it better for her health to live abroad, which she did for more than twenty years, and it was not until after Mr. Wortley's death that she returned to England. The strangeness of this arrangement has given rise to not a little discussion. Why it took place we shall never know ; but it is possible that Leigh Hunt's suggestion may be the true one. Here was a beautiful woman, neglected or coldly treated at home, a woman of high spirit, of great ability, surrounded by admirers, gifted with all the arts that charm in society, and with no high sense of moral obligations,—under such provocation, then, and with such a character, is it improbable that she acted sometimes with a freedom that would have compromised her husband P He was not a man of jealous temperament ; but the friend of Addison had a character to maintain, and his wife's love of scandal, if not the scandal she made for others, may have led him to feel it safer to place the sea between them.

Many persons know Lady Mary chiefly from the ignoble quarrel between her and Pope,—one of the strongest illustra- tions of the coarseness of the age that could readily be cited. Or they remember her, perhaps, for the splendid courage she displayed in encouraging inoculation and braving the opposi- tion of half the doctors in England. In the present day, however, Lady Mary would be little more to us than a name, were it not for the letters which have given her a prominent place in literature. These letters are written with an ease and freshness that put to shame the labonred efforts of Pope. The new and admirable edition published by Mr. Bell tempts us once more to tarn over Lady Mary's fascinating pages and to listen to the gossip which, despite the changes of a century and a half, is as sparkling and amusing as ever. The so-called Turkish letters, published a year after the writer's death, are the most brilliant, but they are also the most familiar, and, moreover, have the disadvantage of being composed in an epistolary form as a convenient literary arrangement. We prefer, therefore, the letters which fulfil the first condition of this kind of composition,—namely, those that were really addressed to friends, and express the feelings and fancies of the hour in which they were written. It is evident that Lady Mary knew their value, for in writing to her sister, she says :—" The last pleasure that fell in my way was Madame Sdvignd's letters : very pretty they are, but I assert without the least vanity that mine will be full as entertaining forty years hence. I advise you, therefore, to put none of them to the use of waste-paper."

The writer has a fund of satire. Some of her comments on the frailties of her female acquaintances remind us of Mrs. Candour in The School for Scandal. They are very ludicrous and very naughty, and too coarse-grained in expression for quotation in our columns. "I own," she writes, "I enjoy vast delight in the folly of mankind and, God be praised, that is an inexhaustible source of enjoyment." She confesses to a certain giddiness, calls herself a wild girl, and at the mature age of thirty-seven shows her youthful vivacity by pretending that the only three pretty men in England are in love with her. "This will amaze you extremely," she adds ; "but if you were to see the reigning girls at present, I will assure you there is very little difference between them and old women." It is amusing to read in a note that the gentleman referred to in our next quotation lived for half-a-century after Lady Mary's prediction. "As for news, the last wedding is that of Peg Pelham, andI think I have never seen so comfortable a prospect of happiness; according to all appearances, she cannot fail of being a widow in six weeks at farthest, and accordingly she has been so good a housewife as to line her wedding clothes with black." The Countess of Mar, to whom the frankest letters are written, complains constantly of low spirits, and ultimately lost her mind. Her sister, on the contrary, will have nothing to do with the black fiend, Melancholy. "I wonder," she says, "you can talk to me of being an old woman ; I beg I may hear no more on't. For my part, I pretend to be as young as ever, and really am as young as needs to be, to all intents and pur- poses. My cure for lowness of spirit is not drinking nasty water, but galloping all day, and a moderate glass of sham-

pagne at night in good company ; and I believe this regimen, closely followed, is one of the most wholesome that can be pre- scribed."

One of the best features of this remarkable woman's character is her love of literature and her eagerness in the acquisition of knowledge. The fine gentlemen of the age re- garded this as a fault, and sneered at "the least pretensions to reading or good sense in ladies of quality." Writing to Dr. Gilbert Burney, Lady Mary says :—" We are permitted no books but such as tend to the weakening and effeminating of the mind. Our natural defects are every way indulged, and it is looked upon as in a degree criminal to improve our reason, or fancy we have any." Not, she continues, that she wishes to argue for an equality of the sexes, " God and Nature having thrown women into an inferior rank." This is very modest of Lady Mary, or probably a little insincere, but it must be remembered that she was writing to a Bishop. All her life long she was a great reader, and in her exile from England, nothing seems to have given her more delight than the arrival of a box of books. "No entertainment," she writes, "is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting;" and, again, addressing her daughter, the Countess of Bute, she says :—"I know by experi- ence it is in the power of study not only to make solitude tolerable, but agreeable. I have now lived almost seven years in a stricter retirement than yours in the Isle of Bute, and oan assure you I have never had half-an-hour heavy on my hands for want of something to do. Whoever will culti- vate their own mind will find full employment." But she would not exclude needlework, thinking it "as scandalous for a woman not to know how to use a needle as for a man not to know how to use a sword." Her judgments of books and men are often admirable. Nothing can be more just, for instance, than her estimate of Lord Bolingbroke. After saying that he spoils a good argument by a profusion of words, and that in style he is far below Tillotson or Addison, she adds —"I own I have small regard for Lord B. as an author, and the highest contempt for him as a man. He came into the world greatly favoured both by Nature and fortune, blest with a noble birth, heir to a great estate, and endowed with a strong constitution, and, as I have heard, a beautiful figure, high spirits, a good memory, and a lively apprehension which was cultivated by a learned education. All these glorious advantages being left to the direction of a judgment stifled by unbounded vanity, he dishonoured his birth, lost his estate, ruined his reputation, and destroyed his health by a wild pursuit of eminence even in vice and trifles."

Like all sensible people, Lady Mary dearly loved a novel, and her comments on the tales she read are amusing, if not always just. She was "such an old fool" as to weep over Clariesa Har- lowe, but, on the whole, thought it most miserable stuff. "Any girl that runs away with a young fellow without intending to marry him should be carried to Bridewell or to Bedlam the next day I look upon this and Pamela to be two books that will do more general mischief than the works of Lord Rochester." On the other hand, she writes ne plus ultra on the title-page of the most famous novel of her relative, Henry Fielding, and a box with his works having reached her one evening, she was "fool enough to sit up all night reading." Her admiration, however, was not indiscriminate, and she wonders that Fielding does not see that the heroes of Amelia and Tom Jones are sorry scoundrels. Very fond she is, too, of her dear Smollett, and is sorry he " disgraces his talents by writing those stupid romances com- monly called history." Nothing in the shape of fiction seemed to come amiss to Lady Mary in her old age, and she tells the Countess of Bute that she sees new story-books with the same pleasure that her "eldest daughter does a new dress, or the youngest a new baby." Next to books, she found the greatest amusement in gardening, "the plaything of her age ;" and, on the whole, this woman of fashion shows to the best advantage when living in retirement. The gossip in Lady Mary's letters tells us much about the period which is left unnoticed by historians. Lettere, for example, between England and Italy appear to have taken about a month in the transit ; but one of the writer's most frequent com- plaints is that letter after letter fails to reach its destina- tion. In Venice, we are told that " it is the fashion for the greatest ladies to walk the streets, which are admirably paved, and a mask, price sixpence, with a little cloak and the bead of a domino, the genteel dress to carry you everywhere." In Naples, two coaches, two running footmen, four other footmen, a gentle-

man-usher, and two pages are said to be as necessary as the attendance of a single servant is in London ; in Genoa, an unfurnished palace fit for a prince may be hired for fifty pounds per annum. "The number of servants is regulated, and almost every lady has the same, which is two footmen, a gentleman- usher, and a page who follows her chair." In Geneva she

witnessed " the simplicity of old Rome in its earliest age. The Magistrates toil with their own hands, and their wives liberally dress their dinners against their return from their little senate." And here is a lively picture of manners at Brescia in 1748 :—

" I had a visit in the beginning of these holidays of thirty horse of ladies and gentlemen, with their servants. They came with the kind intent of staying with me at least a fortnight, though I had never seen any of them before ; but they were all neighbours within ten miles round. I could not avoid entertaining them at sapper, and by good lack had a large quantity of game in the house, whioh, with the help of my poultry, furnished oat a plentiful table. I sent for the fiddles, and they were so obliging as to dance all night, and even dine with me next day, though none of them had been in bed ; and were much disappointed I did not press them to stay, it being the fashion to go in troops to one another's houses, hunting and

dancing together a month in each castle I left the room about 1 o'clock, and they continued their ball in the saloon above stairs, without being at all offended at my departure. Bat the greatest diversion I had was to see a lady of my own age comfortably dancing with her own husband, some years older, and I can assert that she jumps and gallops with the beet of them."

Here we must close these familiar but ever-entertaining Letters, which we are glad to possess in this carefully edited and attractive form. The work is virtually a reprint of the third edition of Lord Wharncliffe's Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, with the additions and corrections of Mr. Mop Thomas. To these some fresh matter is added, and the edition may therefore be regarded as the most complete hitherto published.