Lady Mary Wortley Montague Part 23

Our s.e.x's weakness you expose and blame, Of every prating fop the common theme; Yet from this weakness you suppose is due Sublimer virtue than your Cato knew.

From whence is this unjust distinction shown?

Are we not formed with pa.s.sions like your own?

Nature with equal fire our souls endued: Our minds as lofty, and as warm our blood.

O'er the wide world your wishes you pursue, The change is justified by something new, But we must sigh in silence and be true.

"How the great Dr. Swift would stare at this vile triplet! And then what business have I to make apologies for Lady Vane, whom I never spoke to, because her life is writ by Dr. Smollett, whom I never saw? Because my daughter fell in love with Lord Bute, am I obliged to fall in love with the whole Scots nation? 'Tis certain I take their quarrels upon myself in a very odd way; and I cannot deny that (two or three dozen excepted) I think they make the first figure in all arts and sciences; even in gallantry, in spite of the finest gentlemen that have finished their education at Paris.

"You will ask me what I mean by all this nonsense, after having declared myself an enemy to obscurity to such a degree that I do not forgive it to the great Lord Viscount Bolingbroke, who professes he studied it. I dare swear you will sincerely believe him when you read his celebrated works. I have got them for you, and intend to bring them. _Oime!

l'huomo. propone, Dio dispone_. I hope you won't think this dab of Italian, that slid involuntarily from my pen, an affectation like his Gallicisms, or a rebellion against Providence, in imitation of his lords.h.i.+p, who I never saw but once in my life: he then appeared in a corner of the drawing-room, in the exact similitude of Satan when he was soliciting the court of Heaven for leave to torment an honest man."

CHAPTER XVII

LAST YEARS (1760-1762)

Lady Mary writes the history of her own times--Her health--Death of Edward Wortley Montagu--His will--Lady Mary ponders the idea of returning to England--She leaves Italy--She is held up at Rotterdam--She reaches London--Horace Walpole visits her--Her last illness--Her fort.i.tude--Her death--She leaves one guinea to her son.

One of Lady Mary's amus.e.m.e.nts towards the end of her life was writing the history of her own time. "It has been my fortune," she said, "to have a more exact knowledge both of the persons and facts that have made the greatest figure in England in this age, than is common; and I take pleasure in putting together what I know, with an impartiality that is altogether unusual. Distance of tie and place has totally blotted from my mind all traces of resentment or prejudice; and I speak with the same indifference to the Court of Great Britain as I should do of that of Augustus Caesar." Lady Mary, however, merely wrote for her own entertainment, and burnt her ma.n.u.script almost as soon as it was composed. It would certainly have made interesting reading; but she never had any idea of publication. "I know mankind too well to think they are capable of receiving the truth, much less of applauding it; or, were it otherwise, applause to me is as insignificant as garlands on the dead."

"I am exceedingly glad of your father's good health: he owes it to his uncommon abstinence and resolution," Lady Mary wrote to her daughter, April 11, 1759. "I wish I could boast the same. I own I have too much indulged a sedentary humour and have been a rake in reading. You will laugh at the expression, but I think the liberal meaning of the ugly word rake is one that follows his pleasures in contradiction to his reason. I thought mine so innocent I might pursue them with impunity. I now find that I was mistaken, and that all excesses are (though not equally) blamable. My spirits in company are false fire: I have a damp within; from marshy grounds frequently arises an appearance of light. I grow splenetic, and consequently ought to stop my pen, for fear of conveying the infection."

"My health is very precarious; may yours long continue and see the prosperity of your family. I bless G.o.d I have lived to see you so well established, and am ready to sing my _Nunc dimittis_ with pleasure,"

Lady Mary wrote to her daughter in November, 1760; and early in the next year she touched on the same subject in a letter to Sir James Steuart.

"I have not returned my thanks for your obliging letter so soon as both duty and inclination prompted me but I have had so severe a cold, accompanied with a weakness in my eyes, that I have been confined to my stove for many days.... I am preparing for my last and longest journey, and stand on the threshold of this dirty world, my several infirmities like posthorses ready to hurry me away."

It was in January, 1761, that Edward Wortley Montagu pa.s.sed away at the age of eighty-three. He died at Wharncliffe, the family seat of the Wortleys, where he had lived in a most miserly manner. He had only one luxury--tokay, of which he was pa.s.sionately fond. He left a great fortune, the highest estimate of which was 1,350,000. Horace Walpole said the estate was worth 600,000. Walpole gives some particulars of the legacies: "To his son, on whom six hundred a-year was settled, the reversion of which he has sold, he gives 1,000 a-year for life, but not to descend to any children he may have by any of his many wives. To Lady Mary, in lieu of dower, but which to be sure she will not accept, instead of the thirds of such a fortune, 1,200 a-year; and after her to their son for life; and then the 1,200 and 1,000 to Lady Bute and to her second son; with 2,000 to each of her younger children; all the rest, in present, to Lady Bute, then to her second son, taking the name of Wortley, and in succession to all the rest of her children, which are numerous; and after them to Lord Sandwich, to whom, in present, he leaves about 40,000. The son, you perceive, is not so well treated by his own father as his companion Taaffe[22] is by the French Court, where he lives, and is received on the best footing; so near is Fort l'Eveque to Versailles."

[Footnote 22: Theodore Taaffe, an Irish adventurer, who, with Edward Wortley Montagu, was imprisoned in Fort l'Eveque, at Paris, for cheating at cards in 1751. The incident has been given in a pamphlet written by Montagu.]

On hearing of the death of her husband, Lady Mary bethought herself of returning to England, from which she had been absent for more than a score of years. She was seventy-two years old, and may well have thought that her time, too, would soon come, and that she would like to die in her native country. Still, it was some time before she could bring herself to a decision to set out. She was delighted with the political success of Lord Bute and pleased with her daughter's prosperity, but "I am doubtful whether I will attempt to be a spectator of it," she confided in Sir James Steuart in April. "I have so many years indulged my natural inclinations to solitude and reading, I am unwilling to return to crowds and bustle, which would be unavoidable in London. The few friends I esteemed are now no more: the new set of people who fill the stage at present are too indifferent to me even to raise my curiosity." Also, as she said, she was beginning to feel the worst effects of age, blindness excepted, and was grown timorous and suspicious.

It was no light thing for a woman of Lady Mary's age to voyage alone, except for a servant or two, from Venice to London. Yet her indomitable spirit came to her aid, and in the autumn of 1761 she left Italy. She travelled by way of Augsberg and Frankfort to Rotterdam. The journey had been far from agreeable. "I am dragging my ragged remnant of life to England," she wrote to Sir James Steuart on November 20. "The wind and tide are against me; how far I have strength to struggle against both I know not; that I am arrived here is as much a miracle as any in the golden legend; and if I had foreseen half the difficulties I have met with I should not certainly have had courage to undertake it.... I am nailed down here by a severe illness of my poor Marianne, who has not been able to endure the frights and fatigues that we have pa.s.sed."

When, about three weeks later, Marianne had sufficiently recovered to move on, Lady Mary was held up by a hard, impenetrable frost. The delay irked her, and she became somewhat depressed, and said that she was dubious, in her precarious state of health, whether she would arrive at her destination. At the beginning of the new year, she did actually make a start, and got half way to Helvoet, and was obliged to turn back by the mountains of sea that obstructed the pa.s.sage. "I have had so many disappointments I can scarce entertain the flattering thought of arriving in London," the poor lady complained; but she found comfort in that "It is uncommon at my age to have no distemper, and to retain all my senses in their first degree of perfection." Later in the month she arrived in London.

Horace Walpole, who heard everything, had, of course, heard that Lady Mary was returned to England, and in a letter of October 8, 1761, announced her return, adding with a brutality unusual even in him: "I have not seen her yet, though they have not made her perform quarantine for her own dirt." However, as he discovered shortly after, it was Lady Mary Wrottisley, and not Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had arrived.

Of course, when Lady Mary had come to London, Walpole was one of the first to go and see her. "I went last night to visit her," he wrote to Sir Horace Mann on January 29. "I give you my honour, and you who know her, would credit me without it, the following is a faithful description.

I found her in a miserable little chamber of a ready-furnished house, with two tallow candles, and a bureau covered with pots and pans. On her head, in full of all accounts, she had an old black-laced hood, wrapped entirely round, so as to conceal all hair or want of hair. No handkerchief, but up to her chin a kind of horse-man's riding-coat, calling itself a _pet-en-l'air,_ made of a dark green (green I think it had been) brocade, with coloured and silver flowers, and lined with furs; boddice laced, a foul dimity petticoat sprig'd, velvet m.u.f.feteens on her arms, grey stockings and slippers. Her face less changed in twenty years than I could have imagined; I told her so, and she was not so tolerable twenty years ago that she needed to have taken it for flattery, but she did, and literally gave me a box on the ear.

She is very lively, all her senses perfect, her languages as imperfect as ever, her avarice greater. She entertained me at first with nothing but the dearness of provisions at Helvoet. With nothing but an Italian, a French, and a Prussian, all men-servants, and something she calls an _old_ secretary, but whose age till he appears will be doubtful; she receives all the world who go to homage her as Queen-mother, and crams them into this kennel. The d.u.c.h.ess of Hamilton, who came in just after me, was so astonished and diverted, that she could not speak to her for laughing. She says that she left all her clothes at Venice. I really pity Lady Bute; what will the progress be of such a commencement?"

Lady Mary rented a house in Great George Street, Hanover Square, whither her daughter and grandchildren came often. Occasionally she went about, and from time to time would grace an a.s.sembly with her presence. Horace Walpole saw her at some gathering, dressed in yellow velvet and sables, with a decent laced head and a black hood, almost like a veil, over her face. His prognostication that she would by her interference and demands for "jobs" make life hideous for Lord and Lady Bute proved to be unfounded, and he had the grace to say, "She is much more discreet than I expected, and meddles with nothing"; but he could not refrain from saying that "she is woefully tedious in her narrations."

Lady Mary was suffering from cancer, which she concealed from her family and acquaintances until about the beginning of July (1762). Then it burst, and there was no hope of her life being much prolonged. On July 2 she wrote her last letter to Lady Frances Steuart, saying, "I have been ill a long time, and am now so bad I am little capable of writing, but I would not pa.s.s in your opinion as either stupid or ungrateful. My heart is always warm in your service, and I am always told your affairs shall be taken care of." If she was a bad woman to cross, at least even on her deathbed she tried to do service to her friends. Death had no terrors for her; she said she had lived long enough; and she died, as she had lived, with great fort.i.tude.

Lady Mary pa.s.sed away on August 21, 1762, at the age of seventy-three.

Her remains were interred in the graveyard of Grosvenor Chapel, where also lie Ambrose Phillips, David Mallett, Lord Chesterfield, William Whitehead, John Wilkes, and Elizabeth Carter.

All that Lady Mary possessed, except some trifling legacies, she left to Lady Bute. Her fortune is believed to have been inconsiderable, except for some valuable jewels. Walpole had one last gibe: "With her usual maternal tenderness and usual generosity, she has left her son one guinea." The gibe was unworthy, because Walpole knew quite well the career of that son, who, anyhow, was sufficiently provided for. It may be that it was the p.r.i.c.king of Walpole's conscience for this last outburst that made him later administer a stern rebuke to Lady Craven.

"I am sorry to hear, Madam, that by your account Lady Mary Wortley was not so accurate and faithful as modern travellers. The invaluable art of inoculation, which she brought from Constantinople, so dear to all admirers of beauty, and to which we owe, perhaps the preservation of yours, stamps her an universal benefactress; and as you rival her in poetic talents I had rather you would employ them to celebrate her for her nostrum, than detect her for romancing."