MONTAGU, Lady Mary Wortley, an English lady of distinguished talents, but of eccentric character, was the eldest daughter of Evelyn Pierrepont duke of Kingston, and Lady Mary Fielding, daughter of William earl of Denbigh, and was born at Thoresby, Nottinghamshire, in the year 1690. Both on the father’s and the mother’s side Lady Mary came of a stirring race, the Pierreponts and Fieldings having taken active parts in the civil war, though under painful circumstances of family division. But there was genius as well as activity in her blood; for the mother of Beaumont the dramatist was a Pierrepont, and Lady Mary had a common ancestor with Villiers duke of Buckingham, who was her grand uncle. The Fieldings, however, were not thought very bright, until Henry, who was her second cousin, came to enhance their reputation; and Lady Mary says that they were all called “fair and foolish.” At the age of four she lost her mother; but her grandmother, a sensible woman, appears to have7lone something towards supplying the place of her deceased parent. By Lady Mary’s own account of her education, it was “one of the worst in the world ;” but this is to be taken with very considerable qualification. She was indeed left to a superstitious nurse and a weak governess; but her understanding being naturally much superior to that of her instructress, she was induced to profit by her brother’s advantages, and, under the tuition of his preceptors, acquired some knowledge of Latin, a smattering of Greek, and the rudiments of the French language. At the age of eight she had made considerable proficiency in her studies, and began to read all the books she could lay her hands on; poetry, philosophy, and romances, particularly those of the old French school, of which she became exceedingly enamoured. Her first known poetical effusion was an Epistle from Julia to Ovid, which she wrote at the age of twelve, and which, besides the complimentary cant of gallantry, exhibits a nice apprehension of the reigning melody in verse, being exactly in the style which Dryden would have employed in addressing Lady Castlemain, or Garth, in inscribing upon drinking glasses verses on the beauty of his mistress. At fifteen she formed a project of establishing an English nunnery; and had she then been mistress of an independent fortune, she would certainly (she says) have executed it, and elected herself lady-abbess. At twenty, she translated Epictetus, most probably from the Latin version, under the eye of her friend Bishop Burnet.

Amongst the early female friends of Lady Mary was Mrs Anne Wortley, sister of Mr Edward Wortley Montagu, whose father, Sidney, a son of the well-known Earl of Sandwich, had added the name of Wortley to that of Montagu, in consequence of his marriage with an heiress. Edward Wortley was not a man of gallantry, and had taken little pains to cultivate the acquaintance of his sister’s friends; but happening one day to meet with Lady Mary Pierrepont in her apartments, he was so much struck with her wit and beauty, as well as charmed with the unusual accomplishment of a love for the classics, that, in a few days, he made her a present of Quintus Curtius, an author she had mentioned as never having read, accompanied with some verses, indifferent enough in themselves, but, from a person of his character, amounting to a declaration of love. His sister fanned the flame with all her might; and a correspondence ensued, which, after a good deal of hesitation, doubt, and indecision on the part of the lady, ended in the marriage of the parties. Mr Wortley has been represented as a dull phlegmatic country gentleman, of a tame genius and moderate capacity, or as a man of parts more solid than brilliant, which is only a civil way of saying the same thing; nor does there seem to be any good ground for questioning the accuracy of this description, although his attainments as a scholar, and his distinction as a politician, were both considerable. But however this may be, the marriage seems to have been ill assorted, and certainly proved unfortunate. There was probably no real affection upon either side; and if it be true that Lady Mary’s temper was not good, Mr Wortley was scarcely the man to supply any defects on her part, or to bear long with such infirmities. That she possessed great good sense is evident; but her sarcasms and her self-will, united with a sense of superiority, and perhaps also some resentment of the coldness evinced towards her by her husband, sufficiently indicate the radical disparity, or rather incongruity, of character which existed between them.

In 1714, Mr Wortley obtained a place in the treasury, and, in consequence, took his lady to court, where her wit, spirit, and beauty attracted general admiration, and made a considerable impression on the Prince of Wales, afterwards George II. In 1716, Mr Wortley, who had made, no great figure at home, was appointed ambassador to Constantinople, where his success was not more remarkable. But he took his wife with him to the capital of the Turkish empire, and thus afforded her an opportunity, in her Letters from the Levant, of charming the world with the most luxurious pictures ever yet given of a voluptuous people; and of bringing away with her, in the shape of inoculation for small-pox, a talisman for the preservation of beauty. From these, and indeed from all her future letters, it is clear that her good sense was sound and uncompromising, with an ever-increasing tendency towards universal justice; and that her husband, excepting as holder of the purse, and a person entitled to certain conventional consideration, had already become an individual of no mark or likelihood in her society. Nobody seems to think of him as he travels, except out of delicacy towards his companion. Gallants at Vienna and elsewhere do not see him, nor notice him. Pope makes flagrant love to her in his letters, as if no such person existed; or adds his compliments to the husband, as if the love-making was an affair of perfect indifference to him. Besides Constantinople, Lady Mary and her husband, whilst abroad, visited several parts of Germany; and on their return sailed through the Archipelago, touched on the coast of Africa, and, crossing the Mediterranean to Genoa, reached home through Lyons and Paris in October 1718. From all these places we have letters of the liveliest, and, considering the time at which she wrote, of the most original description; a traveller so shrewd and observant was till then unknown, and her sex gave to the novelty an additional attraction. The manners of Italy she found peculiarly congenial to her disposition; and accordingly, when, in 1739, she resolved to pass the remainder of her life on the Continent, she betook herself to that country, and remained there until within less than a year of her death.

On her return from the East, Pope prevailed on her to come and live near him at Twickenham. Both were then in the zenith of their reputation, and mutual admiration seemed to give assurance of the stability of their friendship. But a short time sufficed to prove that this anticipation was ill founded. Jealousy of her talents, and a difference of political sentiments, have been gravely assigned as the primary causes of that dislike on tìie part of Pope, which soon manifested itself with such exasperated and vindictive animosity. But neither of these causes can have had the least share in producing the rupture. To ascribe it to jealousy of her wit is ridiculous, because on this score there neither was nor could be rivalry or competition; and as to difference of political sentiments, Lady Mary’s predilections and attachments were the same before as after the quarrel, and hence Pope’s hatred of the Whigs could not have had any such influence as has been ascribed to it.
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The real cause appears to have been altogether different. Lady Mary’s own statement, the truth of which seems to be borne out by other evidence, was this; that at some ill-chosen time, when she least expected what romances call a “declaration,” Pope made such passionate love to her, as, in spite of her utmost endeavours to be angry and look grave, provoked an immediate burst of laughter, from which moment he became her implacable enemy. Now, if “hell has no fury like a woman scorned,” it may, by a parity of analogy, be imagined with how deep and black a sense of mortification the poor, misshapen, applauded poet must have felt himself smitten, and all his future recollections degraded, by an ever-present sense of scorn and contempt. To say that he had no right thus to address her, is to say the truth; yet to believe that her manners and cast of character, as well as the nature of the times, and of the circles in which she moved, had given no license, no encouragement, no hope of pardon to the presumptuous declaration, is impossible; and to trample in this way upon the whole miserable body of his vanity and humility, upon all which the consciousness of acceptability and glory amongst his fellow-creatures had given him to sustain himself, and all which, in so weak, fragile, and dwarfish a shape, required so much to be sustained, was not very humane in her ladyship, and assuredly beyond the reach of forgiveness in Pope. On her part, a little pity might have divided the moment with contempt; it was scarcely necessary to be quite so cruel to one who was really so insignificant. On his, the contemptuous laughter which greeted his proposals must have carried a poisonous blight to his heart, and changed into the venom of deadly malice the blood by which it had been momentarily warmed into love. Yet nothing can palliate, far less excuse, the gross and indecent manner in which he indulged his resentment, or the mean prevarication with which he evaded every direct charge of ungrateful behaviour towards those whose patronage he had once servilely solicited.

But it is a relief to turn from the sight of Lady Mary as a beauty and a wit, to consider her in the character of a mother, and, what is more, in that of a public benefactress. On her return from Constantinople, she introduced inoculation for the small-pox into England, through the medium of the medical attendant of the embassy. She had lost her only brother by the disease, which had also destroyed her own beautiful eye-lashes; and she was resolved to give to her family and the world the benefit of a practice which promised to save the lives and to preserve the beauty of millions. With courageous love, she began upon her own offspring, and lived to see her innovation triumphant, though not until it had encountered such an opposition that she almost repented of her philanthropy. But this only enhanced the merit of her perseverance, and the many sacrifices of time and spirit which she consented to make; for she submitted to be hawked about as a sort of nurse and directress, in families which required comfort under the experiment. Her descendant informs us, that when four great physicians were deputed by government to watch the progress of her daughter’s inoculation, they “betrayed not only such incredulity as to its success, but such an unwillingness to have it succeed, such an evident spirit of rancour and malignity, that she never cared to leave the child alone with them one second, lest it should in some secret way suffer from their interference.” But these must surely have been only a mother’s terrors, aggravated perhaps by a little of her own sarcasm and vehemence. At the same time, professional persons seldom evince much favour for discoveries or improvements in their own art originating with others, whom they regard as interlopers; and it is probable enough that, whilst she contrived, by her ready wit, to make the physicians appear very small in their own eyes, they, on the other hand, were fain to assert their own dignity by trying to look big and contemptuous.

Lady Mary preserved her supremacy in the world of fashion, and continued to give fresh proofs of her talents, until the year 1739, when, in the month of July, she left England with a resolution to pass the remainder of her life on the Continent. She proceeded at once to Venice; and having determined to establish herself in the north of Italy, she took possession of a deserted palace on the banks of Lake Isco, in the Venetian territory, where she planned a garden, applied herself to the business of a country life, and solaced herself with books sent by her daughter Lady Bute, which in some measure supplied the want of society. It seems probable that one of the causes which drove her from England was the enmity she had kindled up all around her by the license of her tongue and pen, and not any flagrant irregularity of conduct, as some have pretty broadly insinuated. She was always writing scandal. A journal full of it was burned by her family, not without good reason, if, from the quality of some of her published writings, a conjecture may be formed as to the nature of its contents. Her very panegyrics were sometimes malicious; and even Pope himself, with all λ the temptations of wit and resentment, would hardly have written of her as he did, had her reputation for satirical strictures been less a matter of notoriety. As to her life on the Continent, it seems to have been chiefly passed, as we have already described, amongst books and gardens, not altogether neglecting the cultivation of intelligent society; though evidences occasionally escape her pen of things more in unison with what was alleged of her by her enemies. At the same time it is impossible to attach any credit to the malicious exaggerations of Horace Walpole, or to regard with any other feeling than disgust his portrait of Lady Maryin her old age, painted with all the evil gusto and the coarse plastering of an angry procuress.

On the death of Mr Wortley, which took place in 1761, she yielded to the solicitations of her daughter, and, after an absence of twenty-two years, returned to England, where she arrived in the October of the same year. But her health had suffered much from a cancer she had long concealed, and the fatigues she had undergone in her journey to England tended to exasperate its symptoms; the malady increased rapidly, and, before ten months had elapsed, she expired, on the 21st of August 1762, in the seventy-third year of her age. Notwithstanding this cruel distemper, she bore her sufferings with a spirit the reverse of complaining, and preserved to the last her vivacity of temper and character. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was unquestionably the most remarkable woman of her time; the presiding female wit in the days of Pope, the benefactress of her species by the introduction of inoculation, and the keen satirist of the fashionable circles. Her poems are indeed little else than wit in rhyme, mere vers de société; but her prose is truly admirable; better than accurate, to which it has seldom much claim, it is idiomatical, off-hand conversation, without effort and without inelegance, fresh, racy, and piquant, sparkling with wit, and often equally remarkable for strong sense and sarcastic bitterness. The conventional shows of things could not deceive her; she saw beneath the painted masks which are worn in society, detected much that men and women try to conceal, and fearlessly published her detections. Pity that she did not see a little farther into the sweets of things which are not conventional; that she had not more faith in the heart, as well as in the blood and in good sense; more confidence in virtue, higher aspirations, and more ennobling objects of ambition, than those in pursuing which she wasted her fine powers, and embittered the greater part of her life.

It is unnecessary to specify her ladyship’s various productions in prose and verse, or even to refer to the edition[7:15:425] of her works published by Daliaway, with a memoir of her life; because the former would lead to needless detail, and the latter has, in a great measure, been superseded by the edition of her Letters and Works, with additional letters and particulars of her life, published by her great-grandson Lord Wharncliffe, London, 1837, in three volumes 8vo. This edition, notwithstanding some inaccuracies, is peculiarly valuable on account of the new matter which has been embodied in it, the new light which it throws upon some parts of her ladyship’s character and history, and the perfect candour and fairness with which the noble editor has performed his difficult and somewhat trying task. (a.) Montagu, Edward Wortley, only son of the preceding Lady Mary, was born in October 1713, and, in the early part of his life, the object of his mother’s most tender regard. In 1716, he accompanied his parents to Constantinople, and, on their return to England in 1718, was placed at Westminster School. Here he gave the first indication of his wayward disposition, by running away, and eluding all search, until about a year afterwards, when he was accidentally discovered at Blackwall, with a basket of fish on his head. In point of fact, he had bound himself, by regular indenture, to a poor fisherman, whom he had served faithfully, making shrewd bargains, and honestly accounting to the fisherman for his gains. Emancipated from this degrading condition, he was again placed at Westminster School; but ere long he absconded a second time, and bound himself to the master of a vessel engaged in the Oporto trade, who, supposing him a friendless boy, treated him with great kindness and humanity. This generous conduct, however, awakened no corresponding feelings of gratitude upon his part; for he had scarcely landed at Oporto when he ran away up the country, and contrived to get employment for two or three years in tending the vines. Here he was at length discovered, brought home, and, on promise of amendment, pardoned; but unhappily with no better effect than before. He ran away a third time, after which his father procured him a tutor, who so far reclaimed him to habits of regularity, that he obtained an appointment in one of the public offices. In 1747, he was elected one of the knights of the shire for the county of Huntingdon; but he does not appear to have in any way distinguished himself as a member of parliament, nor did he long retain his seat, his expenses having so far exceeded his income, that, towards the close of the year 1751, he found it prudent once more to leave England. He proceeded to Paris, where, in a short time, he was imprisoned in the Châtelet for some fraudulent gambling transaction in which he had been concerned; but-he soon escaped, or effected his liberation, though by what means is unknown. He published a defence of his conduct, written by himself, in French, against one Abraham Payba, a Jew by birth, who assumed the fictitious name of Roberts; and had it translated into English from an authentic copy, which he transmitted to this country for the purpose. In the parliament which assembled in 1754, he was returned for Bossiney; and, besides some dull communications to the Royal Society, he published a book on the Rise and Fall of the Ancient Republics, the merit of which was afterwards claimed by his tutor, Mr Foster. In a word, he seems to have been the offspring of the perplexity of his father’s and mother’s first position, the victim of their mistake, and privileged to obtain what excuses and comforts he could get from them; which, to do them justice, they generally afforded, though not always in the best manner, or with the right distribution of blame, and the proper allowance on all sides. His father died in the year 1761, at an advanced age, and, by his will, bequeathed to his son a considerable annuity, at the same time empowering him to make a settlement of L.800 a year upon any woman he might marry, and devising to any son of such marriage an estate in the west riding of Yorkshire. It was this clause which gave rise to a story that he had advertised for a wife, promising to marry any widow or single lady, of genteel birth and polished manners, who happened to be five, six, or seven months advanced in pregnancy. That such an advertisement appeared is certain; but then its publication took place in 1776, within a few months of his death, and at a time when he was abroad, circumstances which render the story somewhat improbable. His mother died in the year 1762, and left him only one guinea. He had offended her irreconcilably. But as his father’s bequest had rendered him independent, he took a final leave of his native country, passed the remainder of his life in foreign parts, and died at Padua in 1776. Before his death he realized a remarkable prediction of his mother, by becoming first a Catholic and then a Mahommedan, in which latter character he ended his days, with a turban on his head, a long beard, and, it is alleged, a harem into the bargain. He travelled into the East, and wrote some observations on Pompey’s Pillar, as it is called, as well as an account of a journey from Cairo to the Gebel Mokattam, or Written Mountains, in the desert of Sinai. He is also said to have published an Explication of the Causes of Earthquakes, though it has not been mentioned at what time, or in what place. His travels in the East occupied several years, during which he underwent his different religious transformations, and ultimately settled down into Mahommedanism, the ceremonies of which he performed with a punctuality savouring of that peculiar derangement which he more or less exemplified in almost every action of his life. (a.) Montague Island, one of the New Hebrides, in the South Sea, near Sandwich Island. Long. 168. 37. E. Lat. 17. 26. S.