One night in the autumn of 1776, the house in Hill Street was crowded. The French ambassador and Mme. de Noailles were there, but the hero of the night was Garrick, who electrified his audience by reciting scenes from Macbeth and Lear. “Though they had heard so much of you,” Mrs. Montagu wrote to Roscius, “they had not the least idea such things were within the compass of art and nature. Lady Spencer’s eyes were more expressive than any human language.... She amazed them with telling them how you could look like a simpleton in Abel Drugger, had many comic arts equally surprising, when murderous daggers and undutiful daughters were out of the question.” Mme. de Noailles was so profuse, as she descended the stairs, in thanks for the great intellectual enjoyment, that Mrs. Montagu was afraid she would forget herself, and, by a false step, break her neck. She fervently hoped, too, that Garrick had not caught cold by going out into the air, “when warmed with that fire of genius which animated every look and gesture.” In March, 1779, Johnson wrote to Mrs. Thrale: “On Monday, I came late to Mrs. Vesey. Mrs. Montagu was there. I called for the print” (of Mrs. Montagu, in the costume of Anne Boleyn) “and had good words. The evening was not brilliant but I had thanks for my company.” In October of the same year, Johnson wrote to Mrs. Thrale: “I have been invited twice to Mrs. Vesey’s _conversation_, but have not gone.” Johnson has described a scene at one of the Bluestocking assemblies (Mrs. Ord’s) where, as he wrote to Mrs. Thrale: “I met one Mrs. Buller, a travelled lady of great spirit and some consciousness of her own abilities. We had a contest of gallantry an hour long, so much to the diversion of the company, that at Ramsay’s, last night, in a crowded room, they would have pitted us again. There were Smelt, and the Bishop of St. Asaph, who comes to every place, and Lord Monboddo, and Sir Joshua, and ladies out of tale.” On another night he was at Miss Monkton’s, the then young lady who many may remember as the old and eccentric Lady Cork. Mr. Langton, in a letter to Boswell, thus paints the groups of Bluestockings at the house of the lady who shared with Mrs. Montagu the glory of being their founder: “The company consisted chiefly of ladies, among whom were the Dowager Duchess of Portland, the Duchess of Beaufort, whom, I suppose from her rank, I must name before her mother, Mrs. Boscawen, and her eldest sister, Mrs. Lewson, who was likewise there, Lady Lucan, Lady Clermont, and others of note, both for their station and understandings. Amongst other gentlemen were Lord Althorp, Lord Macartney, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Lord Lucan, Mr. Wraxall (whose book you have probably seen, the ‘Tour to the Northern Parts of Europe,’ a very agreeable, ingenious man), Dr. Warren, Mr. Pepys the master in chancery, and Dr. Barnard the Provost of Eton. As soon as Dr. Johnson had come in and had taken the chair, the company began to collect