Lady Mary Wortley Montague

Lady Mary Wortley Montague,
by Lewis Melville

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Title: Lady Mary Wortley Montague Her Life and Letters (1689-1762)
Author: Lewis Melville
Release Date: January 4, 2004 [EBook #10590]
Language: English
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LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU
Her Life and Letters (1689-1762)

By
LEWIS MELVILLE
WITH A FRONTISPIECE BY AUBREY HAMMOND, AND SIXTEEN
OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS

To EDITH AND JOHN CABOURN

PREFACE
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu has her niche in the history of medicine
as having introduced inoculation from the Near East into England; but
her principal fame is as a letter-writer.
Of her gifts as a correspondent she was proud, and with reason. It was
in all sincerity that in June, 1726, she wrote to her sister, Lady Mar:
"The last pleasures that fell in my way was Madame Sévigné's letters:
very pretty they are, but I assert, without the least vanity, that mine will
be full as entertaining forty years hence. I advise you, therefore, to put
none of them to the use of waste paper." And again, later in the year,
she said half-humorously to the same correspondent: "I writ to you
some time ago a long letter, which I perceive never came to your hands:
very provoking; it was certainly a chef d'oeuvre of a letter, and worthy
any of the Sévigné's or Grignan's, crammed with news." That Lady
Mary's belief in herself was well founded no one has disputed. Even
Horace Walpole, who detested her and made attacks on her whenever
possible, said that "in most of her letters the wit and style are superior
to any letters I have ever read but Madame de Sévigné's." A very
pleasant tribute from one who had a goodly conceit of himself as a
letter-writer.
Walpole, as a correspondent, was perhaps more sarcastic and more
witty; Cowper undoubtedly more tender and more gentle; but Lady
Mary had qualities all her own. She had powers of observation and the

gift of description, which qualities are especially to be remarked in the
letters she wrote when abroad with her husband on his Mission to the
Porte. She had an ironic wit which gave point to the many society
scandals she narrated, a happy knack of gossip, and a style so easy as to
make reading a pleasure.
Some of the incidents which Lady Mary retails with so much humour
may be accepted as not outraging the conventions of the early
eighteenth century when it was customary to call a spade a spade; when
gallantry was gallantry indeed, and the pursuit of it openly conducted.
What is not mentioned by those who have written about her is that she
was possessed of a particularly unsavoury strain of impropriety which
outraged even the canons of her age. Some twenty years after her death,
it was mentioned in the Gentleman's Magazine that Dr. Young, the
author of Night Thoughts, had a little before his death destroyed a great
number of her letters, assigning as a reason of his doing so that they
were too indecent for public inspection. Only the other day I had
confirmation of this from a distinguished man of letters who wrote to
me: "I have somewhere hidden away a copy of a letter by Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu, which was sent to me by a well-known collector
about thirty-five years ago, because he couldn't destroy it and wouldn't
for worlds be found dead with it in his possession--so terrific is it in
character. I'll tell you about it some day when we meet: I can't write it.
In any case you couldn't use it or even refer to it.... I suppose that my
friend quite felt that the document, however objectionable, should not,
on literary grounds, be destroyed. What my executors will think of me
for having it in my possession, the Devil only knows."
Whether this strain permeated the diary which Lady Mary left behind
her when she eloped in 1712, and which was destroyed by one of her
sisters, no one can say; but it is a curious fact that the diary she kept in
later years was destroyed by her devoted daughter, Lady Bute. "Though
Lady Bute always spoke of Lady Mary with great respect," wrote Lady
Louisa Stuart, "yet it might be perceived that she knew it had been too
much