“I think,” she wrote to Lord Kames, in 1782, “the calm autumn of life, as well as of the year, has many advantages. Both have a peculiar serenity—a genial tranquility. We are less busy and agitated, because the hope of the spring and the vivid delights of the summer are over; but these tranquil seasons have their appropriate enjoyments, and a well-regulated mind sees everything beautiful that is in the order of nature.” In 1785, Cumberland took the new assemblies, at Montagu House, for the subject of an essay in _The Observer_. He places Mrs. Montagu, under the name of Vanessa, in the foreground, and mingles praise with mockery. He does not refer to the slang word by which the assemblies conducted by ladies were known; he calls Vanessa’s assembly the Feast of Reason. Throughout life, according to this essayist, Vanessa had been a beauty or a wit, whose vanity had this good quality, namely, that it stimulated her to exercise charity, good nature, affability, and a splendid hospitality,—qualities which carried her into all the circles of fine people, and crowded all the fine people into hers.... In her saloons there was a welcome for every follower of science, every sort of genius,—a welcome which extended, so the satirical essayist affirms, from the manufacturer of toothpicks to the writer of an epic poem. Authors looked to her for fees in return for dedications; and players, for patronage and presents on their benefit nights. According to Cumberland, the lady of Montagu House was seated, like the statue of Athenian Minerva, incensed by the breath of philosophers, poets, orators, and their intellectual brethren. Hannah More states, on the contrary, that at the original Bluestocking parties, previous to 1781, the company, instead of being a formal unity, were broken up into numberless groups. Something, too, of this fashion seems to be referred to by Cumberland, who describes Vanessa as going from one to another, making mathematicians quote Pindar, persuading masters in chancery to write novels, and Birmingham men to stamp rhymes as fast as buttons. We are further told that the books on Vanessa’s table (and Mrs. Montagu often complained of the number of presentation copies which were sent to her) indicated who were among her guests. This little civility is sneered at, and she from whom it emanated was also occasionally sneered at by some of her guests; which would have been more natural than courteous if the lady of the house ever dressed herself, as Cumberland describes her with boundless exaggeration, in a dress on which were embroidered the ruins of Palmyra! The same exaggeration is applied to the description of the company, among whom figure cracked philosophers and crazy dreamers, with Johnson alone grand, powerful, majestic, eloquent, and ill-mannered.