Montagu (Lady Mary Wortley), 1689–1762. Born [Mary Pierrepont; Lady Mary in 1690, when her father became Earl of Kingston], in London, 1689; baptized, 26 May. Early taste for literature. Married to Edward Wortley Montagu, 12 Aug. 1712. In favour at Court. Friendship with Pope begun. In Vienna with her husband (appointed Ambassador to the Porte), Sept. 1716 to Jan. 1717; in Constantinople, May 1717 to June 1718. Returned to England, Oct. 1718. Estrangement from Pope, 1722. Lived abroad, apart from husband, July 1739–1762. Died, in England, 21 Aug. 1762. Works: “Court Poems” (anon.; surreptitiously published), 1716 (misdated 1706 on title-page); authorised edn., as “Six Town Eclogues” (under initials: Rt. Hon. L. M. W. M.), 1747. Posthumous: “Letters of Lady M——y W———y M——e” (3 vols.), 1763; “Poetical Works of the Right Hon. Lady M———y W———y M——e,” 1781.

Personal

	SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF
	THE RIGHT HONORABLE
	LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU,
	WHO HAPPILY INTRODUCED FROM TURKEY
	INTO THIS COUNTRY
	THE SALUTARY ART
	OF INOCULATING THE SMALLPOX.
	CONVINCED OF ITS EFFICACY
	SHE FIRST TRIED IT WITH SUCCESS
	ON HER OWN CHILDREN
	AND THEN RECOMMENDED THE PRACTICE OF IT
	TO HER FELLOW-CITIZENS.
	THUS BY HER EXAMPLE AND ADVICE
	WE HAVE SOFTENED THE VIRULENCE
	AND ESCAPED THE DANGER OF THIS MALIGNANT DISEASE.
	TO PERPETUATE THE MEMORY OF SUCH BENEVOLENCE
	AND TO EXPRESS HER GRATITUDE
	FOR THE BENEFIT SHE HERSELF RECEIVED
	FROM THIS ALLEVIATING ART,
	THIS MONUMENT IS ERECTED BY
	HENRIETTA INGE—
	RELICT OF THEODORE WILLIAM INGE, ESQ.,
	AND DAUGHTER OF SIR JOHN WROTTELSEY, BART.,
	IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1789.

  The boy was engrafted last Tuesday, and is at this time singing and playing, very impatient for his supper, I pray God my next may give as good an account of him. I cannot engraft the girl, her nurse has not had the small-pox.

	The playful smiles around the dimpled mouth,
	That happy air of majesty and truth;
	So would I draw (but oh! ’tis vain to try,
	My narrow genius does the power deny).
	The equal lustre of the heavenly mind,
	Where every grace with every virtue’s joined;
	Learning not vain, and wisdom not severe,
	With greatness easy, and with wit sincere,
	With just description show the soul divine,
	And the whole princess in my work should shine.

	What lady’s that to whom he gently bends?
	Who knows not her? Ah, those are Wortley’s eyes.
	How art thou honoured, numbered with her friends;
	For she distinguishes the good and wise.

	Thus in the dame each nobler grace we find,
	Fair Wortley’s angel accent, eyes, and mind.

  A woman of as fine a genius, and endu’d with as great a strength of mind as any of her sex in the British kingdoms.

  Her dress, her avarice, and her impudence must amaze any one that never heard her name. She wears a foul mob that does not cover her greasy black locks, that hang loose, never combed or curled, an old mazarine blue wrapper, that gapes open and discovers a canvas petticoat. Her face swelled violently on one side with the remains of a ——, partly covered with a plaister, and partly with white paint, which for cheapness she has bought so coarse.

  There is more fire and wit in all the writings of that author than one meets with in almost any other; and whether she is in the humour of an infidel or a devotee, she expresses herself with so much strength that one can hardly persuade oneself she is not in earnest on either side of the question. Nothing can be more natural than her complaint of the loss of her beauty [vide the “Saturday” in her “Town Eclogues”]; but as that was only one of her various powers to charm, I should have imagined she would only have felt a very small part of the regret that many other people have suffered on a like misfortune; who have nothing but the loveliness of their persons to claim admiration; and consequently, by the loss of that, have found all their hopes of distinction vanish much earlier in life than Lady Mary’s;—for if I do not mistake, she was near thirty before she had to deplore the loss of beauty greater than I ever saw in any face beside her own.

  Now I must tell you a story of Lady Mary. As she was on her travels, she had occasion to go somewhere by sea, and (to save charges) got a passage on board a man of war: the ship was (I think) Commodore Barnet’s. When he had landed her, she told him, she knew she was not to offer to pay for her passage, but in consideration of his many civilities intreated him to wear a ring for her sake, and pressed him to accept it, and he did. It was an emerald of remarkable size and beauty. Some time after, as he wore it, some friend was admiring it, and asked him how he came by it. When he heard from whom it came, he laughed and desired him to shew it to a jeweller, whom he knew. The man was sent for. He unset it; it was a paste not worth forty shillings.

  Lady Mary Wortley is arrived. I have seen her. I think her avarice, her dirt, and her vivacity are all increased. Her dress, like her language, is a galimatias of several countries; the groundwork rags, and the embroidery nastiness. She needs no cap, no handkerchief, no gown, no petticoat, no shoes. An old black laced hood represents the first; the fur of a horseman’s coat, which replaces the third, serves for the second; a dimity petticoat is deputy, and officiates for the fourth; and slippers act the part of the last.

  She does not look older than when she went abroad, has more than the vivacity of fifteen, and a memory which, perhaps, is unique. Several people visited her out of curiosity, which she did not like. I visited her because her husband and mine were cousin-germans. Though she had not any foolish partiality for her husband or his relations, I was very graciously received, and you may imagine entertained, by one who neither thinks, speaks, acts, or dresses, like anybody else. Her domestick is made up of all nations, and when you get into her drawing-room, you imagine you are in the first story of the Tower of Babel. An Hungarian servant takes your name at the door; he gives it to an Italian, who delivers it to a Frenchman; the Frenchman to a Swiss, and the Swiss to a Polander; so that, by the time you get to her ladyship’s presence, you have changed your name five times, without the expense of an act of parliament.

  To Congreve she was all brightness, life and spirit; her silvery laugh sounded like divinest melody; but when I stood before her, scarcely daring to look into those eyes for that sacred love after which I pined, she was cold, severe, and silent. When Pope was near, when Wharton was by her side, gazing at her with his large and earnest eyes, how beautiful she appeared; all her genius shone out of her spirit face; her features glowed with animation; her tongue spake in softest accents, and she seemed a something more than earthly. But when the visitor departed, a magic change came over her—she froze, as it were, into marble; she grew cold, still, selfish, unfeeling, capricious, and exacting. One reads in old romances of a beautiful damsel discovered in a forest by some brave, errant knight; she weeps, she prays, she smiles, she fascinates. The gallant adventurer vows to devote his life to her service; she leads him to her bower, or to some faërie castle. Something in her appearance suddenly awakens suspicion, and the noble knight clutches his good sword Excalibar within his mailed hand, and mayhap as an additional precaution lifts up a prayer to God and the Virgin. Scarcely has he done it, when a transformation is seen—a mighty transformation indeed; and the virgin disappears, and he sees only a venomous serpent looking at him with deadly eyes, as Lucifer looked on Eve, and hissing forth cold poison. Such was the difference between my mother before her visitors, and my mother with her son.

  Mr. Horace Walpole remembers Lady M. W. Montague perfectly well, having passed a year with her at Florence. He told me this morning that she was not handsome, had a wild, staring eye, was much marked with the smallpox, which she endeavoured to conceal, by filling up the depressions with white paint. She was a great mischief-maker, and had not the smallest regard for truth. Her first gallant after her marriage was Lord Stair, our ambassador at Paris. Worsdale, the painter, told Mr. Walpole that the first cause of quarrel between her and Pope was her borrowing a pair of sheets from the poet, which, after keeping them a fortnight, were returned to him unwashed.

  Lady Mary had Lord Byron’s fate…. Lord Byron was a moody, fiery, brooding child,—full of passion, obstinacy, and irregularity, in his teens;—Lady Mary was a single-thinking, classical, daring, inspired girl long under one-and-twenty. Lord Byron at a plunge formed his own spreading circles on the glittering still-life lake of fashionable society: Lady Mary with her beauty and her genius effected the same result by the same impetuosity. Lady Mary made, as it would appear, a cold unsatisfactory marriage, but, it must be admitted, with one possessed of a patience untainted by genius:—Lord Byron iced himself into the connubial state, but shuddered at its coldness. The press, and the poets, and the prosers united with serene ferocity against both. Both, alas! were

	“Souls made of fire and children of the sun,
	With whom revenge was virtue!”

Their revenge was mutual-minded. Misunderstood, calumniated, they quitted the land which was not worthy of them. Genius-born, they both passed to the east; and to them we owe the most sensible,—the most passionate,—the most voluptuous,—and the most inspired pictures of “the land of the citron and myrtle,” that have ever waked the wish and melted the heart of us southron readers.

  The most entertaining, fascinating, witty and brilliant of her sex; learned, accomplished, graceful and beautiful, the irresistible Lady Mary Pierrepont gave from her earliest years promise of what she afterwards became. At eight years old she was a toast, and the fame of her beauty and talents spread from that time, every fresh year adding to her attractions, and luring new admirers, until the crowd of those who followed in her train filled every country through which she passed. She was the very impersonation of all the beauties and enslavers which poets and romancers feign: she might have sat for the portrait of the most finished fine lady, the most enchanting coquette; and she probably, in effect, supplied many a writer with such a heroine as was the fashion of her day. Yet, with the admirers innumerable, and all appliances and means to boot that should have enabled her to make a happy marriage, the charming Lady Mary was unhappy in the choice she made. She possessed so many useful virtues, had so much philanthropy and feeling, that it is impossible but that she would have made a good wife, even in spite of the danger she had run of being spoilt by indulgence and adulation, if she had met with a man of suitable mind, who would have appreciated her good qualities; but Mr. Wortley was a cold, severe, unimaginative person, who, marrying her, a youthful beauty and coquette, should have known how, judiciously, to correct her errors, and brought forth the excellencies which existed in her mind; instead of treating her with the sullen neglect to which, from an early period of her marriage, he condemned her…. It is to be regretted that she made a match so unsuitable to her; for had she fortunately married a man of a different character, from the cold, harsh, severe person, for whom she gave up all her early brilliant prospects, no doubt she would have been as valuable in domestic life, as she was admirable in literary attainments, and fascinating in the qualities which delight the world.

  And so farewell, poor, flourishing, disappointed, reconciled, wise, foolish, enchanting Lady Mary! Fair English vision in Turkland; Turkish vision in ours; the female wit of the days of Pope; benefactress of the species; irritating satirist of the circles. Thou didst err for want of a little more heart,—perhaps for want of finding enough in others, or for loss of thy mother in infancy,—but thy loss was our gain, for it gained us thy books, and thy inoculation. Thy poems are little, being but a little wit in rhyme, vers de société; but thy prose is much,—admirable, better than acute, idiomatical, off-hand, conversational without inelegance, fresh as the laugh on the young cheek, and full of brain. The conventional show of things could not deceive thee: pity was it that thou didst not see a little farther into the sweets of things unconventional,—of faith in the heart, as well as in the blood and good sense! Lovable, indeed, thou wert not, whatever thou mightst have been rendered; but admirable thou wert, and ever wilt thou be thought so, as long as pen writeth straight-forward, and sense or Sultana hath a charm.

  Had Lady Mary Wortley lived in the days of heathen Greece or Rome, such service as she performed in the introduction of inoculation, would have enrolled her name among the deities who have benefited mankind. But in Christian England, her native land, on which she bestowed such a vital blessing, and through it, to all the people of the West, what has been her recompense? We read of princely endowments bestowed by the British government upon great generals; of titles conferred and pensions granted, through several generations, to those who have served their country; of monuments erected by the British people to statesmen and warriors, and even to weak and worthless princes; but where is the national monument to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu? Is it in Westminster Abbey? Or has it been only by the private bounty of a woman that her good deed has a record? On the pages of history, and in the annals of medicine, the name of Lady Montagu must find its place; but should not England be proud to honor her noble daughter, whose memory, from royal palace to pauper’s hut, ought to be held in grateful affection?

  We doubt whether at any moment of his life, Mr. Wortley was a loving and affectionate husband. So far as we can fathom his character, he appears to have been a man of shrewd good sense, upright and honourable, but of a mean and penurious nature, which after his father’s death, and when the possible million of which he died possessed loomed in the distance, became an all-absorbing passion. In the eyes of the “wits,” Lady Mary was remarkably mean; in the eyes of her husband she was extravagant.

  The members of the very exclusive Kit-Kat Club assembled in council at the commencement of the London Season, 1698, to nominate the lady who should be their standing toast for the current year—have her honoured name inscribed upon their drinking-glasses, and her portrait painted in Kit-Kat fashion,—were considerably puzzled for a choice; when the Earl of Dorchester, afterwards Duke of Kingston, suggested the eldest of his three daughters, the Lady Mary Pierrepont. This proposition being demurred to, inasmuch as the said Lady Mary Pierrepont was personally unknown to the members of the club, the Earl volunteered to go at once and bring her there for approval. He soon returned, bringing with him a beautiful child of about eight years of age, the Lady Mary in question, who was received with acclamation, declared the toast of the year, and remained throughout the banquet, receiving the compliments and caresses of the members with a delightful ease far more womanly than child-like,—so early responsive to opportunity was her gay coquetry of nature. The emotions of gratified vanity excited upon this occasion left an indelible impression on her mind. “Pleasure were too poor a word,” she exclaims, “to express my sensations: never again throughout my life have I spent so happy a day.” There is an unconscious self-revelation in these few words rarely observable in her ladyship’s clever and elaborate correspondence with all its artistic confidences, and here and there apparent abandon.

  Whatever esteem we may feel for the talents and merits, whatever toleration we may be inclined to extend over the eccentricities and audacities, of such women as Lady Mary Wortley Montague, it is the rankest and most nauseous cant of hypocritical chivalry to pretend that they have a right to expect the same tender and reverent forbearance which all but the vilest of men and subscribers feel for “any woman, womanly.”

  The fact seems to have been that Lady Mary, like many of the men of the eighteenth century, had developed the intellectual and practical side of her nature at the expense of the emotions. There is no proof that she was ever in love with anyone but her husband; and her affection for him began in intellectual companionship, and consisted to a considerable extent in respect, with a touch of fear. Her love-letters are full of business details, plain speaking, and close reasoning. Her lover gives her up rather than violate his principles as to marriage settlements, and she heartily approves him. All this is very sensible, but it is hardly the note of passion, even allowing for the undemonstrative character of the age. Family affection was not strongly developed in Lady Mary: her father’s death leaves little impression on her. He had neglected her; why should she mourn for him? Her religion, again, was the Whig Christianity of the day, the moderately rationalistic, tolerant half-deism of the Georgian Bishops; she never speaks but with contempt of past mystics or present Methodists. Patriotism had little hold on her—she was cosmopolitan; and though English defeats galled her a little, English victories left her cold. All her failings—coarseness of phrase, coldness of feeling, want of consideration in the use of her wit, even the slovenliness of dress into which she fell—are the faults of a nature too merely intellectual. One may say that she was all her days a traveller, regarding the world of life as she did the lands through which she journeyed. The joys of existence were but the chance of a fine day, or a good inn on the road; its griefs but the breaking of a wheel, the discomfort of a hovel—all alike to be borne with quietly, because they would be gone and almost forgotten to-morrow. Friends, relations even, were but travelling-companions—here to-day, gone to-morrow.

  There is in Litchfield Cathedral a cenotaph representing Beauty weeping the loss of her Preserver; it was placed there by some grateful person to perpetuate the memory of the Lady Mary’s benevolence in introducing inoculation; and I think it is the only eulogy to be found on any memorial tablet of this strange, witty, beautiful, indiscreet, studious, unhappy, disappointed woman.

  The lady who bears in English literature the courtesy title of “Lady Mary,” without any necessary addition, was, oddly enough, connected with Evelyn by blood and with Pepys by marriage.

Poems

  The letters of Gold, and the curious illumining of the Sonnets, were not a greater token of respect than what I have paid to your Eclogues; they lie inclosed in a monument of red Turkey, written in my fairest hand; the gilded leaves are opened with no less veneration than the pages of the Sibyls; like them, locked up and concealed from all profane eyes, none but my own have beheld these sacred remains of yourself; and I should think it as great a wickedness to divulge them, as to scatter abroad the ashes of my ancestors.

  The town is an owl, if it don’t like Lady Mary, and I am surprised at it; we here are owls enough to think her eclogues very bad; but that I did not wonder at.

  Of her poetical talents it may be observed, that they were usually commanded by particular occasions, and that when she had composed stanzas, as any incident suggested them, little care was taken afterwards; and she disdained the scrupulous labour, by which Pope acquired a great degree of his peculiar praise. But it should be remembered, that the ore is equally sterling, although it may not receive the highest degree of polish of which it is capable. She attempted no poem of much regularity or extent. In the “Town Eclogues,” which is the longest, a few illegitimate rhymes and feeble expletives will not escape the keen eye of a critic. The epistle of Arthur Gray has true Ovidian tenderness, the ballads are elegant, and the satires abound in poignant sarcasms, and just reflections on the folly and vices of those whom she sought to stigmatize. There is little doubt, but that if Lady Mary had applied herself wholly to poetry, a near approximation to the rank of her contemporary bards would have been adjudged to her, by impartial posterity.

  She was an extraordinary woman; she could translate Epictetus, and yet write a song worthy of Aristippus.

  She had beauty for the fashionable, satire for the witty, knowledge for the learned, and intelligence for the politician. She was not too refined to shrink from what we now consider the coarseness of that time. Many of her verses themselves are scarcely adapted for our decorous pages.

  How coarsely, and even lewdly, she herself could write is proved in the “Epistle from Arthur Grey, the Footman;” a composition which a penny street ballad-monger would now blush to own; and added to its offences against decency is the cruelty of holding up the poor lady, whose notoriety was already sufficiently dreadful, to further ribaldry. Nor does this poem stand alone; the “Town Eclogues” and others of her fugitive pieces are almost equally gross.

  If some of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s “Town Eclogues” were attributed to Pope and Gay, and by them not disclaimed, the circumstance may be taken as proof that her verse was thought very good, in its day. It was by no means equal to her prose, nevertheless it sparkled with a considerable amount of satirical wit, as indeed anything from her pen could hardly fail to do…. Save for certain of the graces which adorn our modern vers de société, her poems have not much about them to please the modern taste.

  In many respects, though hard and mannish in temper, Lady Mary was eminent for width of view and for a mind open to the whole intellectual horizon. Her “Town Eclogues,” printed in 1716 in heroic verse, are so rich and sparkling that they almost place Lady Mary among the poets, but they are of astounding freedom of thought and language.

Letters

  The publication of these letters will be an immortal monument to the memory of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and will shew, as long as the English language endures, the sprightliness of her wit, the solidity of her judgment, the elegance of her taste, and the excellence of her real character. These letters are so bewitchingly entertaining that we defy the most phlegmatic man on earth to read one without going through with them, or, after finishing the third volume, not to wish there was twenty more of them.

  They have entertained me very much. What fire, what ease, what knowledge of Europe and of Asia! Her account of the manners of the Turkish women is indeed different from any thing we have yet seen.

  The letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montague are not unworthy of being named after those of Madame de Sevigné. They have much of the French ease and vivacity; and retain more the character of agreeable epistolary style, than perhaps any letters which have appeared in the English language.

  Lady Mary Wortley Montague is a remarkable instance of an author nearly lost to the nation: she is only known to posterity by a chance publication; for such were her famous Turkish letters, the manuscript of which her family once purchased with an intention to suppress, but they were frustrated by a transcript. The more recent letters were reluctantly extracted out of the family trunks, and surrendered in exchange for certain family documents, which had fallen into the hands of a bookseller. Had it depended on her relatives, the name of Lady Mary had only reached us in the satires of Pope. The greater part of her epistolary correspondence was destroyed by her mother (?); and what that good and Gothic lady spared, was suppressed by the hereditary austerity of rank, of which her family was too susceptible. The entire correspondence of this admirable writer and studious woman (for once, in perusing some unpublished letters of Lady Mary’s, I discovered that “she had been in the habit of reading seven hours a day for many years”) would undoubtedly have exhibited a fine statue, instead of the torso we now possess; and we might have lived with her ladyship, as we do with Madame de Sévigné.

  The great charm of her letters is certainly the extreme ease and facility with which every thing is expressed, the brevity and rapidity of her representations, and the elegant simplicity of her diction. While they unite almost all the qualities of a good style, there is nothing of the professed author in them: nothing that seems to have been composed, or to have engaged the admiration of the writer. She appears to be quite unconscious either of merit or of exertion in what she is doing; and never stops to bring out a thought, or to turn an expression, with the cunning of a practised rhetorician.

  Are lively and ingenious, but not natural.

  Her letters have been compared with those of Madame de Sevigné, but they do not at all resemble them. The latter have a calm, quiet interest, a sweetness, an ingenuous tenderness, a natural simplicity, which powerfully recommend them to us in those moments when we ourselves are calm or melancholy. Lady Montague’s have infinitely more nerve and vigour, excite a far deeper interest, but of an equivocal and painful cast, and while, in a certain sense, they amuse and gratify, inspire aversion for their writer. On the other hand, Madame de Sevigné is a person whom one would like to have known. She is garrulous, she frequently repeats herself; but it is maternal love which causes the error. In one word, we admire the talents of Lady Montague, but we love the character of Madame de Sevigné.

  Lady Mary wrote admirable letters; letters—not dissertations, nor sentimental effusions, nor strings of witticisms, but real letters; such as any person of plain sense would be glad to receive. Her style, though correct and perspicuous, was unstudied, natural, flowing, spirited; she never used an unnecessary word, nor a phrase savouring of affectation; but still she meant to write well, and was conscious of having succeeded.

  We cannot but suspect, also, that every reperusal of Lady Mary’s “Letters” will tend to a doubt whether her merit has not been somewhat exaggerated. When they first appeared, a traveller and an author of Lady Mary’s rank and sex was a double wonder—which was much increased by Lady Mary’s personal circumstances, and by the vivacity, spirit, and boldness of her pen. But now that the extraneous sources of admiration have run dry, we confess that the intrinsic value of the letters seems less striking; and that if we were to deduct from Lady Mary’s pleasantry and wit, those passages which a respectable woman ought not, perhaps, to have written, we should very considerably reduce her claims to literary eminence. The additional letters now produced will add little to Lady Mary’s fame, and take little from her reputation. They exhibit her neither wittier nor looser than she was already known to be—on the contrary, the pleasantry and the coarseness being diluted as it were, by a large addition of very commonplace matter, the peculiarities of Lady Mary appear on the whole, we think, less pungent than in the earlier editions.

  The best and truest type of English character is exhibited in the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; in which are found united practical good sense, candour, honesty, and truth, combined with a noble self-sacrifice for the object of her love. The best love-letters by far are those written by women.

  One great charm of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s letters, is their being perfectly natural: but then, it is a shrewd, thinking, sensible woman who is natural, not an ordinary being. On whatever subject she touches, we see that she has the grandeur of mind to rise above art.

  Lady Mary made good use of her position in the front of the herd of tourists; she told us what she saw in Turkey,—all the best of what she saw, and all the most remarkable things,—and told it very well.

  “Keep my letters,” she writes to one of her correspondents, “they will be as good as Madame de Sévigné’s forty years hence;” and her prediction has been amply fulfilled. It has been alleged that the essential difference between these two celebrated letter-writers is this, that “the Frenchwoman speaks out of the abundance of her heart, and the Englishwoman out of the clearness of her head.”

  It is impossible to admire too much the grace, ease, and liveliness that breathe through these charming letters. The idiomatic purity and simplicity of the language attests, in conjunction with these qualities, the fundamental simplicity of the lady’s character. A thread of sound English sense, too, seems to be carried through the whole literary product, and seems to be the principal prop whereby it is supported.

  Her rank as the best letter-writer of her sex in English is undisputed.

  If one looks in Lady Mary’s letters for scandal and coarseness, for occasional flippancy and an affectation of cynicism, these blemishes are easily discovered: they were faults of her time, training, and circumstances. The breadth of view, freedom from prejudice, and intelligent observation also to be found there, the touches of serious thought and tenderness which slip out, as it were, almost against the writer’s will, may fairly be credited to herself. The extracts from the letters given here have been chosen rather to illustrate her disposition than her intellect. Her character is still somewhat severely judged, but no one calls her wit in question now.

  Yet the last, and crowning element in her own genius, and therefore in her own style, was her truthfulness to herself, to her foibles and to her convictions. She was one of those born to talk, with tongue or with pen; and never did her self-knowledge boil over so uncontrollably as when accident led her to study, and of course to comment on, the system of “La Trappe.” She had seen too much, and knew too much, to be naïve; but though she could philosophise very reasonably and very effectively on the training and disciplining of the mind, she was not afraid of betraying the contradictions in her own nature. This frankness of feeling, to which her gay but not dishevelled spontaneity of utterance corresponded, makes her always good company; it is only in her earliest letters that there linger traces of the affectation rarely absent altogether from the writings of the young. The humour of her Turkish and later letters has a true ring. And, although few women (whether literary or other) have suffered more than she suffered, in part, may be, through the vivacity of her own temper and the freedom of her own pen,—she had a brave heart; and her high spirit, like all qualities which are of rarer growth, faithfully reflects itself in the current of her style.

  She lacks, perhaps, some of the finer graces of style; but her letters have that one supreme charm, beyond all other letters ever published, or ever written perhaps—they are herself. Take up her volumes and you see not only—or chiefly—the chameleon world she portrayed, but the woman who portrays it. There she is, with her stout, shrewd, wise old face, looking at you through the pages. Are you a humbug of any kind? Be sure Mary has found you out, as she found out the little weak points of St. John Lord Bolingbroke, Samuel Richardson, the great dean of St. Patrick’s, and the false prudes of society. She will quarrel with you—for sixpence. She will tell you a jolly, imprudent, scandalous story before she has known you five minutes; and laugh that loud, candid laugh of hers at quite a doubtful joke. Mention the immortal name of a little crooked poet, and the old eyes will flash fire, hate, and rage; and the name of his Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador to the Porte, and there will come a something on the old face that will warn you that Mary knows how to hold that imprudent tongue of hers sometimes, and on one subject at least to keep the world at bay. She has been dead—is it a hundred years?—with a fine cenotaph to her memory in Litchfield Cathedral; and as she stands beside you, you can hear her old heart still beating life, fight and courage. You can see the human sadness underneath the twinkle in the eyes, and remember how she is all her life battling the demon Melancholy, and vanquishing him, and laughing at him prostrate, and fighting and vanquishing him again, when he gets up, newly armed (as he always does), the next day or the day after that. The firm mouth will soften into a rare tenderness at the mention of her Ladyship of Bute. Who is it says that Mary is close-fisted about money, careless about person and reputation, malignant, shameless, vile? What does it matter who says it? When you read the letters you look up at her, not doubting, and lean across a century to take her hand.

General

  It requires but small familiarity with the originals of the private correspondence of those days, to perceive that Lady Mary’s standards of delicacy and propriety were simply those of her time. Even in the present day considerable differences on these points are observable among nations equally civilised; and wonderment at the unconsciousness betrayed by the one of the feeling of the other, is frequently to be found on both sides. In the gradual change of manners the English people of Lady Mary’s time have become to us, in some degree, as aliens and objects of curious observation, whose points of divergence from our standards it is in like manner hard to forgive. It is not of course pretended that good morals are dependent upon time or place; but we may learn at least from these analogies that it is unwise to expect that any men or women should in these matters be far above the spirit of the society in which it is their lot to live.

  Lady Mary Wortley Montague, who was in her time “the pink of fashion,” and who is compared to Madame de Sévnigé, has such a serious mind, such a decided style, such a precise judgment, and such a harsh sarcasm, that you would take her for a man.

  There is little to be said about Lady Mary Wortley’s writings. Her life and soul and curious personality live in her letters. In her verses there is only the artificial reflex of an age and style of the highest artificiality, with sparkles of wit, no doubt, and full of the wonderful clearness of a keen-eyed, quick, observing woman of the world. But she too, like most other persons with whom one comes in contact in the long vistas of history, is in herself more interesting, more curious, a thousand times closer to us, than any of her works.

  Her intellect, with all the brightness of steel, had also its hardness; wit, taste, and breeding she possessed in abundance, but she had little heart, and wanting natural sensibility, she had also a certain coarseness of moral perception.