Дог Writing to Mrs. Thrale, February 8, 1781, Miss Burney says: as paying some compliment to her eternal A day or two after, at a similar meeting, comprising Mrs. Poyntz, Lady Spencer, Miss Gregory, Lord Mulgrave, the Hon. Augustus Phipps, Sir Cornwallis Maud, Mr. Cholmley, Mrs. Byron (grandmother of the poet), Augusta Byron, Mrs. and Miss Leigh, and others, Mrs. Montagu, who was present, "talked of nothing but Evelina." A little farther on Miss Burney says: "We see Mrs. Montagu very often, and I have already spent six evenings with her at various houses. I am very glad," she continues, "at this opportunity of seeing so much of her, for, allowing a little for parade and ostentation, which her power in wealth, and rank in literature allow some excuse for, her conversation is very agreeable; she is always reasonable and sensible, and sometimes instructive and entertaining." On the Friday following, still at Bath, Mrs. Montagu had an assembly consisting of the same coterie. "We had a very entertaining evening, for Mrs. Montagu, Mrs. Thrale, and Lord Mulgrave talked all the talk, and talked it so well, no one else had a wish beyond hearing them." Mrs. Thrale says of Mrs. Montagu, in a letter of about the same date, with ill-disguised irony, and as if to please her envious correspondent, Miss Burney: 66 Yesterday I had a conversazione. Mrs. Montagu was brilliant in diamonds, solid in judgment, critical in talk." On many occasions, however, it answers Miss Burney's purpose to let us know that Mrs. Montagu was "extremely courteous;' but, then, how could she be otherwise to the "authoress of Evelina"? Throughout the passages where Mrs., Montagu is mentioned, she is in Miss Burney's hands simply the peg on which to hang the rags of glory with which she would have us believe she was continually being decorated. Of the usual character of these passages is the following, but we extract it for the sake of the graphic picture it affords of the interior of Montagu House, and of the style of the entertainments given. there, as well as of the society that frequented them. "This morning (May 25, 1792) I went to a very fine public breakfast given by Mrs. Montagu; the instant I came into the gallery I had the melancholy satisfaction of being seen by Sir George Howard; there is no affectation mixed with his sorrow for poor Lady Effingham: he had Various other such assemblies, at all of tears in his eyes immediately, but he which Mrs. Montagu was the star, are de-spoke cheerfully and asked after my dear scribed; and then follows the account of father very kindly. gentleman with him, whom he introduced | certain amusement of its own), because as Mr. Boscawen's son, and who proved to the detail we extract from among its egobe Lord Falmouth. tistical jactitations is interesting and apposite. "I then made for the dining-room, which was fitted for a breakfast upon this occasion, and very splendidly, though to me, who have so long been familiar to sights and decorations, no show of this sort is new or striking.(!) "A sight that gave me more pleasure was Mrs. Ord and her daughter.. "The crowd of company was such that we could only slowly make way in any part. There could not be fewer than four or five hundred people. It was like a full Ranelagh by daylight. We next met Mr. Porteus. In another letter to her father and sisters she says: "I called on Mrs. Montagu, who showed me her new room, which was a double gratification to me, owing to the elegant paintings by our ingenious Edward. You will have heard this grand room described by Mr. Locke; and some of you, I hope, have seen it. "Tis a very beautiful house indeed, and now completely finished." In a letter from Mrs. Boscawen to Mrs. Delany of about the same date (Nov. 12, 1781) she alludes to Montagu House as follows: "Last night I met at Mrs. Dunbar's Lady Macartney, also Mrs. Montagu, who is very busy furnishing her new house. Part of her family is moved into it." - In 1786 "We then went round the rooms, which were well worth examination and admiration; and we met friends and acquaintance at every other step. Among these, Major Renell, Miss Coussmaker, Lady Rothes, Dr. Russell, who was in high spirits and laughed heartily at seeing the When we come to such passages as the Save me prodigious meal most of the company following, we may well say, made of cold chicken, ham, fish, &c., and from my friends," especially when our said 'he should like to see Mrs. Montagu friends are foes in disguise. make the experiment of inviting all the Fanny Burney, being an attendant of the 99 Masame party to dinner at three o'clock. Queen's dressing-room, her "sweet "Oh!" they would cry, "three o'clock! jesty one day, taking up a book, said, What does she mean? Who can dine at " Now, don't answer what I am going to three o'clock? One has no appetite. say if you have any objection. This book, one can't swallow a morsel-it's alto-I am told, contains the character of Mrs. gether impossible!" Yet, let her invite Montagu?" the same people and give them a dinner, while she calls it a breakfast, and see but how prettily they can find appetites.' "While we were examining the noble pillars in the new room, I heard an exclamation of Est-il possible? Suis-je heureuse?' 'Est-ce bien, ma chère Mdlle. Beurni, que je vois?' &c. Need I say this was Madame de la Fite, who," &c. &c. . "She kept my hand closely grasped be-My dear, I am in your third volume,' she tween both her own with a most resolute empressement," &c., "to the great inconvenience of those who wanted to pass, for we were at one of the entrancea into the great room; and how long she might have continued this fond detention I know not, if a lady whose appearance vied for show and parade with Madame de la Fite's had not called out aloud, 'I am extremely happy indeed to see Miss Burney!' "This was Mrs. Hastings. Major Renell took charge of my catering and regale; Dr. Russell made up our little coterie, and Lord Mulgrave startled me by his hollow voice when he came up suddenly to speak to me." We quote this letter, notwithstanding its redundant vanity (affording, however, a "It was the Observer. I could not deny. it, and she opened it at the account of Vanessa, and read it out, stopping at every I could new name for a key from me: give it to but very few Mrs. Wright the wax-modeller, Dr. Johnson, and some others. But when the Queen came to a pas sage complimentary to a young lady with an Arcadian air, to whom Vanessa says, looked at me with an archness," &c. We need scarcely remark on the maladresse with which this vain and silly woman lugs in her own name on every possible occasion, but her egotism is pardonable beside such spite and duplicity as follows: "How infinitely severe a criticism," she proceeds hypocritically to observe, "is this Vanessa on Mrs. Montagu. I think it a very injurious attack on the part of Mr. Cumberland; for, whatever be Mrs. Montagu's foibles, she is free, I believe, from all vice, and as a member of society is magnif icently useful. This, and much more to this purpose, I instantly said to her Ma jesty defending her as well as I was able [this is uncommonly amusing]. The Queen was very ready to hear me, and to concur in thinking such usage very cruel. She told me that Hume and Lord George Sackville were likewise criticised, under fictitious names." From the editress of Mrs. Delany's autobiography and correspondence, we learn much more of Fanny Burney's real history and character than she chooses to tell us in her own memoirs. It was chiefly to Mrs. Delany's kind recommendation made, it is true, at a time when she knew almost too little of her that she owed the place and the pension she enjoyed as dresser to the Queen; "Mrs. Delany," says Lady Llanover, "being quite unaware that she was utterly unfit for any place requiring punctuality, neatness, or manual dexterity, and that she had not sufficient sound sense, judgment, or discrimination, to preserve her own equilibrium if placed in a sphere so different to that in which she had been brought up." with generous indulgence, and passes over her faults with a very gentle hand, for the sake of the merit he finds in Evelina and the information that can be gleaned from the Diary. The Memoirs, of course, he utterly condemns, but he seems to consider that in accepting her place at Court she not only mistook her vocation, but wasted mental gifts that would, while they made her celebrated, have entertained and benefited posterity. It is difficult to share this opinion, in sight of the numerous failures she made when trying to follow up her first success, which she certainly never afterwards overtook. Among the persons of note of this period, and mixing largely whether in literary or fashionable society, was Mary Granville, great-granddaughter of Sir Bevil Granville, married first to Mr. Pendarves and secondly to Dr. Delany. As the friend of Mrs. Montagu, and shar ing her acquaintance with the beaux-esprits The event soon proved the error of and distinguished persons of the day, we those who had judged her too indulgently; find her continually mentioned in that Miss Burney, the daughter of a music mas- lady's memoirs and correspondence, but ter, and whose chief title to patronage was her own celebrity is chiefly due to the conto be found in her honest father's excel-fidential position she occupied in the lence and uprightness, "became so inordi- household of King George III., his Queen, nately elated," continues Lady Llanover, and the young Princesses, whose friend"by the appointment, that she gradually lost all consciousness of her actual or relative position. She lived in an ideal world of her own, of which she was, in her own imagination, the centre; she believed herself possessed of a spell which fascinated all who approached her... she was convinced all the equerries were in love with her, and never discovered she was continually the object of their ridicule. Many entertaining anecdotes might be related of the ludicrous effect of her farfetched expressions when she desired to be particularly courtly or particularly eloquent." ship she may be said to have enjoyed, notwithstanding the difference of rank. Although of good birth, Mrs. Delany's circumstances were far from affluent, and during the last few years of her life she received, together with a commodious dwelling called "The Lodge," close to the Palace, a pension of 300l. a year. Her autobiography is full of strange and romantic incidents, and though purporting to be an authentic and unvarnished narrative of facts, it reads not only like a novel, but a novel of the times, and might almost have proceeded from the pen of Richardson. If true, the state of society Her position, as this lady intimates, was it describes says little for the morality of an anomalous one, and her understanding the age; and vicious as it is supposed to too shallow to enable her to take a defin- be in the present day, it has, at all events, ite view of the four characters under one vastly improved.* It seems almost incredor other of which she always chose to im-ible that any married woman who condutagine herself a heroine, and to write about ed herself with self-respect could, in the herself accordingly, whether as the "timid rank of life to which Mrs. Pendarves benobody," the "wonderful girl who had longed, have been subjected to the insultwritten Evelina," the "Queen's dresser," ing advances, she seems almost to pique the "amiable and elevated daughter," ""Fan- herself on revealing. ny Burney"! The Quarterly of April 1833 may be referred to for an acute appreciation of her character, the vanity, self-assertion, and deviousness of which are such as to render her record of the times comparatively worthless. Lord Macaulay has treated this writer The assumed names of Herminius, Alcander, Henricus, Sebastian, &c., by which * Johnson, however, is said to have "praised the ladies of his day, insisting that they were more faithful to their husbands and more virtuous in every respect than in former times, because their understandings were more cultivated." Perhaps it was the men only who were profligate. she designates her legion of lovers, while jery woman has offered her of forsaking she styles herself Aspasia, help to impart the ranks of female bachelorship: a fictitious character to the narrative, and "We had promised Miss More to breaktinge it with an affectation which damages the interest it might otherwise inspire. Her correspondence is therefore far more acceptable than her biography, although formidably voluminous and needlessly prolix; still it affords the reader a copious store of scenes among the more cultivated ranks in the days of our great-grandmothers, peopled not with fictitious characters, but by real men and women already well known to us by name and by their written works. In such we cannot but take a warm interest, and naturally seek to learn the detail of their domestic history, and to see them and judge of them in the unstudied privacy of familiar intercourse. Among other communications to be found here, which carry us back into a past century, we have a letter from Dr. Porteus, then Bishop of Chester, addressed to Mrs. Delany, on his return from a pilgrimage to the burial-place of the poet Gray. The solemn scenery of the place," he says, "combined with the recollection of its having given birth to the Churchyard Elegy, and, above all, the circumstance of the author being buried among the rustics whose 'simple annals' he had celebrated, without the least notice being taken of him, not even His name; his years spelled by the unlettered muse all this struck my fancy very forcibly." or In another letter from Mrs. Boscawen we read (May 1786): "The weather is very hot; I have walked till I am as redfaced as a personage I was in company with last night-no other than MadamMonsieur d'Eon, whichever you please; but certainly there is more of a grenadier than a lady in her appearance; she was very easy in her conversation, and I was much entertained. I saw her at Mr. Swin- | burne's. . . . "I also saw Mrs. Chapone at Mr. Pepys'." "I am now returned to London after a hot ride, and found Miss Hannah More come in to dinner." fast with her that morning, and kept our "One day her Majesty came in unannounced, just as Mrs. Delany was sitting down to a simple dinner of veal cutlets and orange pudding; the Queen seated herself at table, and declared she meant to share the meal, praised the cuisine, and desired that the recipe for compounding the orange pudding might forthwith be sent to the royal kitchen." At another time Miss Port-the beautiful Miss Port (her grand-niece and adopted child, and subsequently the mother of Lady Llanover) sitting one day writing in Mrs. Delany's drawing-room at the Lodge, heard a knock at the door: she of course enquired who was there. "It is me," replied a man's voice, somewhat ungrammatically; but grammar appears to have been much disdained in our great-grandmothers' days. "Me may stay where he is," answered Miss Port; on which the knocking was repeated. "Me is impertinent, and may go about his business," reiterated the lady; but the unknown party persevering in a third knock, she rose to ascertain who was the intruder, and to her dismay found it was no other than King George himself she had been unwittingly addressing with so little ceremony. The name of Hannah More, of course, frequently occurs in these volumes: was she not one of the Blue Stocking Sisterhood, and one of the most successful writers among their number? Although, however, she remained Miss Hannah More to the end of the chapter, a former letter from Mrs. Pendarves (Jan. 4, 1732) to Mr. "Nothing at all," replied his Majesty; A. Granville seems to intimate that she at "you was very right to be cautious who least had that one chance it is asserted ev-you admitted." All she could utter was, "What shall I say?" ’ The royal disregard of grammar seems to have furnished a precedent for that of the Court and of society in general. Among a number of interesting personages with whose names we are more or less familiar, John Wesley, his wife and daughters (described as remarkably handsome, stylish girls), are frequently brought before us. of the trees looked like the gilding of the sun." Then follows a betrayal of the feminine envy that moved the writer, Mrs. Pendarves: "I never saw a piece of work so prettily fancied, and am quite angry with myself for not having the same thought, as it is indefinitely handsomer than mine, and could not cost more." This costume must have appeared somewhat hasardé, not to speak more strongly ; but she pleased, to give herself airs, and even to write an impertinent and singularly ungrammatical letter to the King when banished from Court for more than one breach of etiquette. In the class of society of which those of "Our Great-Grandmothers" we are recall-"Prior's Kitty" could afford to dress as ing formed the leaders, ceaseless was the succession of fêtes and amusements: ridottos, operas, balls, routs, and card parties were the order of the day. Mr. Handel "9 was always bringing out some new masterpiece, and at one of the numerous masquerades which illustrated the fashionable season was one at which fun and frolic seem to have got the better of the dignity and haut ton with which we are accustomed to invest our powdered ancestors and their be-patched and be-hooped wives. This characteristic production begins in the third person, merges into the first, and finishes off with the signature of the writer.* In a letter dated November 18, 1729, we have the remark of a laudator temporis acti, where Mrs. Pendarves says, "Lady A., who has all her life acted like a fool, has "Next Wednesday," writes Mrs. Monta- now been publicly exposed by her mongu, "the Duke of Norfolk gives a masquer-strous conduct; since the women never ade, where everybody is to be extrava- were so audacious as they are now, this gantly fine, and all are to pull off their may well be called the brazen age." masks before they leave the house." 66 Midst all the "extravagant finery" it was usual for women to don on these occasions, the beautiful Duchess of Queensbury was bold enough to present herself not only among her "peers," but even at Court, in a toilet simple as that of the lovely young Lavinia" and reliant upon the unadorned adornment of her personal 'charms; pointedly omitting jewels, trinkets, and trimmings of whatever description. This, we may add, was only one of her Grace's vagaries, as at another time she is described as wearing a gown of white satin, embroidered on the bottom of her petticoat with brown hills covered over with all sorts of weeds, and each breadth had an old stump of a tree that ran up almost to the waist, broken and rugged, and worked rough with brown chenille, round which twined nasturtiums, ivy, honeysuckles, periwinkles, convolvuluses, and all sorts of creeping plants, which spread thence their tendrils and covered the petticoat; there were vines with the leaves variegated as you have seen them by the sun, all rather smaller than nature, which made them look very light; the robings and facings were little green banks with all sorts of grasses, and the sleeves and the rest of the gown loose, embroidered with twining branches of the same sort as the petticoat. Many of the leaves were finished with gold, and part of the stumps We suspect a similar conviction has been felt and expressed by every succeeding generation since the time of Horace and before too. ay, The descriptions of the coronations. birthdays, drawing-rooms, and royal weddings offer lively and suggestive pictures of the times, and as études de mœurs form valuable and attractive pages. The circumstance of Pope's Essay on Man having been published anonymously is mentioned, and the various persons to whom it was attributed are named. Among others to Dr. Paget, Dr. Young, or Dr. Desaguliers. "The Essays on Man," writes Mrs. Pendarves (April 27, 1734)," are now owned by Pope, and nobody but Mr. Castleman disputes their authorship; does he think they are too good or too bad to be his?" It seems wonderful that anyone at all conversant with Pope's style could for a moment entertain a doubt on the matter. PART IV. Tu secanda marmora Locas sub ipsum funus, et sepulcri WITHOUT attempting to enumerate all the celebrities of the Georgian period, we may nevertheless renew a passing acquaint See Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Delany, vol 1. p. 194. |