Hannah More’s duties were consistent with cottage life; but Mrs. Montagu held her fortune in trust, and spent it in gratifications, the cost of which made glad hearts in a hundred homes. At some of her assemblies, eccentric as well as intellectual people seem now to have been admitted. Miss Burney notes, in 1792, having encountered at Montagu House “a commonish, non-nothingish sort of a half good-humoured and sensibilish woman!” Soon, however, increasing infirmities weakened Mrs. Montagu’s powers and affected her spirits. But she who was, as Fanny Burney said, so “magnificently useful” in her generation, kept up her magnificence and tried to maintain her usefulness to the last. Her supreme effort to get together the little comfortable, intellectual parties that delighted Hannah More, was made in 1798. “I have been at one bit of Blue there,” wrote Doctor Burney to his daughter. “Mrs. Montagu is so broken down as not to go out. She is almost wholly blind and very feeble.” In the succeeding year, Mrs. Carter wrote to Hannah More: “... She has totally changed her mode of life, from a conviction that she exerted herself too much last year, and that it brought on the long illness, by which she suffered so much.... She never goes out except to take the air of a morning; has no company to dinner (I do not call myself company); lets in nobody in the evening, which she passes in hearing her servant read, as her eyes will not suffer her to read herself.” Mrs. Carter hopes that “a taste for the comfort of living quietly will, for the future, prevent her from mixing so much with the tumults of the world as to injure her health.”