doned any excesses of that, than the least pretensions to reading or good sense. 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. We are taught to place all our art in adorning our outward forms, and permitted without reproach to carry that custom even to extravagancy, while our minds are entirely neglected, and by disuse of reflections filled with nothing but the trifling objects our eyes are daily entertained with. This custom, so long established and industriously upheld, makes it even ridiculous to go out of the common road, and forces one to find as many excuses, as if it were a thing altogether criminal not to play the fool in concert with other women of quality, whose birth and leisure only serve to render them the most useless and most worthless part of the creation. There is hardly a character in the world more despicable, or more liable to universal ridicule, than that of a learned woman; those words imply, according to the received sense, a tattling, impertinent, vain and conceited creature." But although Lady Mary owed to this friend, to whom she denounces in such strong language the frivolity of contemporary womanhood, some suggestions for her Epictetus, the honor of training so apt a pupil lies with a younger scholar. No doubt her devotion to the classics grew in ardor from the date of her first acquaintance with Mr. Edward Wortley Montagu. This gentleman, the grandson of Lord Sandwich, was certainly as accomplished and blameless and-to judge by his portraits-as handsome a young Whig as ever guided the footsteps of a young and enthusiastic girl along the thorny path of learning. At their earli est meeting, Lady Mary, then only fourteen years old, let fall a shrewd piece of criticism on a play to the delight and surprise of at least one member of her audience. He was led, either on that or some other occasion, to make inquiry into her Latin studies, and his first present, characteristically enough, took the form of a beautifullybound volume of Quintus Curtius, accompanied by some exceedingly complimentary verses in the style of the period. There is no young girl but would be flattered at the notion of having for guide, philosopher, and friend a man several years her senior, well known in the world, and on terms of intimacy with all the foremost men of letters of the day. For Mr. Wortley, it appears, could boast of the friendship of Steele and Addison, and the acquaintance of Swift, Garth, and Congreve. What wonder was it if the delighted Lady Mary assiduously cultivated the friendship of her director's sister, Anne Wortley, to whom she wrote careful letters, clearly not intended for Mistress Anne's sole gratification, and from whom she received admirable replies, which, though copied in the handwriting of that admirable lady, were in truth the composition of her brother? By these means Mr. Wortley was enabled not only to check his pupil's errors in Latin, but also to warn her against moral defects, such as inconstancy; and to call attention to specific actions arising from the defect aforesaid, or in precise language to protest against the encouragement given to another admirer. Knowing what we do of Lady Mary's disposition, it would be rash to assert that Mr. Wortley's suspicions were groundless, though the young lady rebutted the charge with vigor. "To be capable," she says indignantly, "of preferring the despicable wretch you mention to Mr. Wortley, is as ridicu lous, if not as criminal, as forsaking the Deity to worship a calf." Let us hope Mr. Wortley was flattered by the comparison. It would have been less relished by the nameless admirer, who, had he heard it, would surely have ceased to importune the lady with his attentions. In 1709 Anne Wortley died, and the lovers entered upon a direct correspondence. Mr. Wortley was a slow and doubting wooer, yet withal a very jealous one, and required a Mirandalike display of frankness from Lady Mary to call forth the definite expression of his intentions. It was a thousand pities she could not find a better Ferdinand to play to. No one can fail to be touched by the pathos of these girlish letters. We seem to see the flushed face, the wet eyes, and the sad, proud smile of the young writer as she makes her confession to this insensible lover: "While I foolishly fancied you loved me (which I confess I had never any great reason for, more than that I wished it) there is no condition of life I could not have been happy in with you, so very much I liked youI may say loved, since it is the last thing I'll ever say to you. This is telling you sincerely my greatest weakness; and now I will oblige you with a new proof of generosity-I'll never see you more." Poor Lady Mary was always urging upon Mr. Wortley-perhaps not very sincerely-that a parting between them was the "consummation devoutly to be wished." With a nice sense of honor she also offered to release him from every obligation since she must come portionless to his arms. For a perverse fate dogged the negotiations for the marriage. Proposals had been made to Lady Mary's father, then Lord Dorchester, and as Mr. Wortley was rich and something of a parti, it might have been expected that the affair would have gone merrily forward. Unfortunately, however, Lord Dorchester had a tad on the subject of entails, and required that the property of which the prospective bridegroom was possessed should be settled on the eldest son of the marriage. As Mr. Wortley, on his side, had conscientious scruples on the same subject, but against the practice of entailing, and an obstinacy-Lady Mary called it resolution-at least equal, if not superior, to that of his future father-inlaw, matters soon came to a deadlock. The Marquis then declared "his grandchildren should never be beggars," and the match being broken off insisted that his daughter should prepare to marry another suitor. In the eighteenth century parents made short work of the matrimonial preferences of disobedient daughters, and Lady Mary was sorely pressed. Between an inflexible father and an equally inflexible lover, with the wedding clothes bought and the day fixed for her union with the (naturally detestable) object of her father's choice, what wonder if she felt herself "in so great a hurry of thought" that she scarcely slept one night for a whole month? Then, like the naval commanders of old, she landed and burnt her ships, in other words, sacrificed her fortune and incurred her father's wrath by secretly eloping with Mr. Wortley in August, 1712. If we can shut our eyes to the sordid business of the entail, there is a fine air of romance about the whole proceeding, and in accordance with the high unwritten laws that govern the destinies of eloping pairs Mr. Wortley and his wife should have passed the remainder of their lives in perfect bliss. But Fate, now and then, seems to our eyes like a poor artist, who spoils by clumsy workmanship the most promising material, and so it happened that this husband and wife, instead of "living happily ever after," critic was early found side by side with the lover. He sent his wife “quarrelling letters" a very few months after marriage, when as usual she was in the country, alone or in uncongenial society, feeling ill and de pressed in spirits. As her impetuous temperament was continually landing her in embarrassments, it will be understood that Mr. Wortley had plenty of scope for the exercise of his peculiar talents as fault-finder. One incident, which seems rather a characteristic one, is recorded by Lady Mary during her sojourn in Turkey. She had used a Turkish cosmetic with the unhappy result that her face became red and swollen. "It remained," she says, "in this lamentable state three days, during which you may be sure I passed my time very ill. I believed it would never be otherwise; and, to add to my mortification, Mr. Wortley reproached my indiscretion without ceasing." The husband, it may be remarked in passing, who takes the occasion to rub salt in a slight wound, may not be prepared to pour in oil and wine when there is a deeper hurt. merely furnished a classical instance the of matrimonial unsuitability. They started on their voyage together with fair hopes, and probably Lady Mary, though she might grumble a little at Mr. Wortley's absolutism-we have seen how in the affair of the entail he clung to his own way at all costswould have made a very charming wife and have loved her husband as much as in after years she loved her children. But Mr. Wortley was as great a failure in matrimonial life as he was in the political world. He was at once exacting and neglectful. Like the famous Sir Willoughby Patterne -with whom we have a notion that he exhibits many traits in common-the mere thought of a rival was torture. In the days of their courtship he had never wearied of insisting that he must be first with the object of his choice, whether that object were Lady Mary herself or another. And in their early married life his great desire seems to have been to despatch his young wife to the depths of the country and keep her there out of the way of harm or possible admirers-while he transacted his business in London. Lady Mary laughingly said, when he sent her to York at the time of Queen Anne's death, that "he had that sort of passion for her which would have made her invisible to all but himself." She might have submitted to his long absences uncomplainingly if he could have comforted her a little more, and perhaps criticised her a little less. "I would not have you do them (i.e. his London affairs) any prejudice," she writes at this time, "but a little kindness costs nothing." And the early letters are full of protest against his indifference and carelessness as a correspondent. Like most dull people, Mr. Wortley seems to have been absolutely correct, and to have admired correctness in others. It is little wonder if in him Though in 1714 Mr. Wortley was appointed one of the Commissioners of the Treasury, his political career was cut short the following year by the return of Walpole, whom he had opposed, to power. Nor was he more successful in diplomacy. After serving for a year in Constantinople as ambassador to the Porte, he received in 1717 letters of recall. No doubt his failure was a cause of mortification to his wife, who on her return to London Society was able to compare her hesitating, scrupulous husband with men who had dash and initiative and were able to cut a figure in the political and fashionable world. It is rare that marital critcism is one-sided only, and the blind admiration of the pupil may give place to the clearer-sighted judgment of the wife. While, on the other hand, there is no man made sensitive by ill-success, but will mark and resent the change, and to judge by the bitter tone of Lady Mary's London letters, her prospects of married happiness were farther off than ever. Indeed, from this time forth she never ceased railing against the holy estate in words which, for all their surface cynicism, betray a suspicion of underlying heart-break and bitterness. "Where," she says in a letter to her sister, "are people matched? I suppose we shall all come right in heaven as in a country dance; the hands are strangely given and taken whilst they are in motion, at last all meet their partners when the jig is done." "As for news," runs a letter in a yet more cynical vein, "the last wedding is that of Peg Pelham, and I think I have never seen so comfortable a prospect of happiness; according to all appearance 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!" At this stage of her career Lady Mary mocked at all things; it is clear that she was by no means happy. Her brilliant powers as a talker, her unconventional views of the world and its ways, were not likely to win the trust or approval of London matrons, and her quarrel with Pope may have rid her of many a fair-weather friend. There were also money troubles with an obscure Frenchman, which caused her endless annoyance, and stimulated by Pope's slanders the town-talk ran on her affairs. "This is a vile world, dear sister," she writes to Lady Mar, "and I can easily comprehend that whether one is in Paris or London, one is stifled with a certain mixture of fool and knave, that most people are composed of. I would have patience with a parcel of polite rogues, or your downright honest fools; but Father Adam shines through his whole progeny. So much for our inside; then our outward is so liable to ugliness and distempers that we are perpetually plagued with feeling our own decays and seeing those of other people. Yet sixpennyworth of commonsense divided among a whole nation would make our lives roll away glibly enough; but then we make laws and we follow customs. By the first we cut off our own pleasures, and by the second we are answerable for the faults and extravagances of others. All these things, and five hundred more, convince me (as I have the most profound veneration for the Author of Nature) that we are here in an actual state of punishment; I am satisfied I have been one of the condemned ever since I was born; and in submission to the divine justice I don't at all doubt but I deserved it in some pre-existent state. I will still hope that I am only in Purgatory, and that after whining and grunting a certain number of years, I shall be translated to some more happy sphere, where virtue will be natural and custom reasonablethat is, in short, where common sense will reign. I grow very devout, as you see, and place all my hopes in the next life, being totally persuaded of the nothingness of this. Don't you remember how miserable we were in the little parlor at Thoresby? We then thought marrying would put us at once. into possession of all we wanted. Though, after all, I am still of opinion that it is extremely silly to submit to ill-fortune. One should pluck up a spirit and live upon cordials when one can have no other nourishment. These are my present endeavors, and I run about, though I have five thousand pins and needles running into my heart. I try to console myself with a small damsel, who is at present everything I like; but, alas! she is yet in a white frock. At fourteen she may run away with the butler-there's one of the blessed effects of great disappointments; you are not only hurt by the thing present, but it cuts off all future hopes, and makes your very expectations melancholy. Quelle vie!" Vanitas vanitatum! Each century echoes the world-old cry of the Preacher. There was no real outlet for this woman's superabundant energy; nothing to occupy her life but the common round of Society pleasures. She was compassionate, but the day for philanthrophy was not yet. She wrote brilliantly, but authorship was a profession denied to women of her class, and though later she beguiled her time with the composition of memoirs, she destroyed them with her own hand. Her husband made no career in which she could render assistance. Even motherhood had brought her keen disappointment, for her only son was an impossible ne'er-do-well. "A mother," she wrote, "only knows a mother's fondness. Indeed, the pain so overbalances the pleasure, that I believe, if it could be thoroughly understood, there would be no mothers at all." It was in 1739 that Lady Mary separated from her husband, whom she never met again, and began the twenty-two years' residence abroad in which she wrote so many of the letters on which her fame depends. Biographers have speculated endlessly as to her reasons for this course, for there seems to have been no open rupture The Gentleman's Magazine. between them, and she continued to write to and of him with surface friendliness, if without much cordiality. It is possible that for many years the necessity of providing a joint home for their daughter had been the sole tie between them, and that when, in spite of her mother's warnings of the pitfalls which encompass the married state, the young lady ventured on the perilous step of accepting Lord Bute, this last tie between the parents was severed. Three years later Lady Mary made use of her freedom to leave a society of which she was weary, and a husband for whom her affection was dead. She wandered about Italy and France, and like many lonely people on whom family life exercises no salutary control, contracted many eccentric habits. The letters of this period, however, show her at her best-wise, witty, observant, full of love for her daughter, solicitude for her grandchildren, while at the last there seems to have come to her something of the quiescence of old age. She survived her husband only a few months, dying in England shortly after her return in 1762. It is easy to speak harm of her, but it is pleasanter far to speak good, for she is one of the most real and delightful women of the eighteenth century. And after all, who are we that we should declare that those who tarry longest in the Valley of Humiliation never reach the Land of Beulah? Mary Dormer Harris. |
