“... I should have been very anxious if such a cargo as the virtues and amiabilities of dear Miss Arnold had been put on board the horrid mail-coach; so, I am obliged to her for complying with my entreaties to take a slower but safer conveyance.... I write in much hurry; the letter-bell tinkles.” The speech referred to in the above letter was made by Mr. Matthew Montagu, when seconding the motion on the royal address with which Parliament was opened. The speech was warmly eulogistic of Mr. Eden’s commercial treaty. Fox praised the young speaker and tore his argument to pieces. Wraxall, referring, in the “Memoirs of His Own Time,” to Mrs. Montagu’s nephew, Matthew Robinson, says: “The celebrated Mrs. Montagu, his aunt, who so long occupied the first place among the _gens de lettres_, in London, having adopted him as her heir, he received her husband’s name. At her feet he was brought up,—a school more adapted to form a man of taste and improvement than a statesman or a man of the world. After this gentleman entered the House of Commons, there was some difficulty in distinguishing between him (Matthew Montagu) and Montagu Matthew. General Matthew himself defined the distinction. ‘I wish it to be understood,’ said he, ‘that there is no more likeness between Montagu Matthew and Matthew Montagu than between a chesnut horse and a horse-chesnut.’” [Illustration: On the Sea-wall at Southampton _Photogravure after the painting by Clairir_] To Mrs. Robinson. “_Sandleford, July 14, 1787._ ... That I was delighted at becoming a grandmother, for such I account myself to the dear babe, cannot be doubted; and surely it is the most agreable and becoming office of old age. I have always wonder’d at the wild and rash ambition which impell’d men to wish and seek for conditions and offices to which they were not by talents or circumstances well adapted; but I may say without vanity, I have the age, the experience, the wrinkles, the foibles which form the compleat character of grandmother; and I long to be in full office, but it will be above a fortnight before father, mother, child and cradle will be fix’d at Sandleford.... I should have been under dreadful anxieties if she had not been so well; for she is the most amiable, agreable, and valuable young woman I ever knew. She is a mere mortal, and, I suppose, she must have some faults; but tho’ I have watched her continually, I have never been able to discover any in her. “... I am not interested in the Christmas quarter. When one is too old to play at blind man’s buff and hunt the whistle, I think one cannot pass a merry Christmas in the country. ‘Tower’d cities pleased us then, And the busy haunts of men.’ Good society and the animated circle of a great town supply all that the winter season deprives us of.