“I do hourly thank my stars,” she says, “that I am not married to a country squire or a beau; for in the country, all my pleasure is in my own fireside, and that only when it is not littered with queer creatures. One must receive visits and return them ... and if you are not more happy in it in Nottinghamshire than I am in Yorkshire, I pity you most feelingly.... Could you but see all the good folks that visit my poor tabernacle, oh, your Grace would pity and admire!” There was neither “squire” nor “beau” in the quiet, refined gentleman she had married. The wife might well be sorry for the absence of such a companion. He had left her, as she expressed it, to her mortification, but with her approbation. She desired him to go, yet half-wished him to stay; but at last “got out honour’s boots, and helped him to draw them on.” “Since I married,” she writes to Mrs. Freind, “I have never heard him say an ill word to any one; nor have I received one matrimonial frown.” For a matrimonial life begun in August, clouds and showers in October would have been an early prodigy indeed. To the duchess, who asked more as to her characteristic doings than her feelings, Mrs. Montagu replied: _December 1742_—“Your Grace asks me if I have left off footing and tumbling down-stairs. As to the first, my fidgetations are much spoiled; sometimes I have cut a thoughtless caper, which has gone to the heart of an old steward of Mr. Montagu’s, who is as honest as Trusty in the play of ‘Grief à la Mode.’ I am told that he has never heard a hop that he has not echoed with a groan.” At another of Mr. Montagu’s houses, Sandleford, near Newbury, Berks, his wife found more genial neighbours than in the north. She especially disliked the rough Yorkshire folk, and she did not conceal the little sympathy she had with “agreeable company.” She felt it a misfortune that she found in few people the qualities that pleased her. Like him who thanked God that he had not a heart that had room for many, she was thankful that she could love only the chosen few; but she could bear with twenty disagreeable people at once, while a tête-à-tête with a single one she disliked made her sick. At Sandleford, she played the farmer’s wife’s part without laying aside that of the lady, or, indeed, of the student. She could rattle off the gayest description of a country fair, losing no one of its characteristic features, and next write a long and thoughtful dissertation over Gastrell, Bishop of Chester’s “Moral Proof of the Certainty of a Future State.” The spirit of this dissertation, contained in a long letter to her friend the duchess, is that of what would now be called a Free Inquirer. She will not bow her intellect to any authority of mortal man. She has hope, but lacks knowledge,—except that God is the loving father of all,—and beyond that she evidently thinks the bishop knows no more than she does.