The ladies around her, at Sandleford, were neither so well endowed intellectually as herself, nor seemingly cared to be. Grottos and shellwork showed the bias of their tastes. Mrs. Montagu speaks of visiting one in Berkshire, which was the work of nine sisters (Leah), who in disposition, as well as number, bore “some resemblance to the Muses.” Lord Fane’s grotto at Basildon was one of the mild wonders of the county. When she goes thence to London, depreciation of the latter shows a growing love for rural life. She describes life in London as being—all the morning at the senate, all the night at play. Party politics were her aversion. They were “pursued for the benefit of individuals, not for the good of the country.” The factious heads in London she described as being very full of powder and very empty of thought. Happy in her own home, she could mingle jesting with sympathy when referring to sorrows which other people had to bear. “I pity Miss Anstey,” she wrote, “for the loss of her agreeable cousin and incomparable lover. For my part, I would rather have a merry sinner for a lover than so serious a saint!” Her own husband, however, was not mirthful. He stuck to his mathematics, understood his business as a coal-owner, loved his wife, and found life a pleasant thing, particularly where his lines had fallen. With the birth of a boy came new occupations, fresh delights, and hitherto unknown anxieties. The nursing mother, remembering her old gay time, declared that “for amusement there is no puppet-show like the pleasant humour of my own Punch at Sandleford.” She fancied a bright futurity for the boy; but her passing ecstasy was damped by the thought of the perils and temptations by which life is beset. “Pity,” she wrote, “that a man thinks it no more necessary to be as innocent as woman than to be as fair.” In March, 1744, when Mrs. Montagu and her sister thought it a remarkable fear to travel from Sandleford, near Newbury, to Dover Street, London, in one day, with only two breakdowns, Mrs. Montagu left her boy in the Berkshire house. “It was no such easy matter,” she said, “to part with little Punch, with whom we played and pleased ourselves as long as we could afford time.” On her return to Sandleford, in July, the natural beauty of the place seemed centred in little Punch’s person. “He is now an admirable tumbler. I lay him down on a blanket on the ground every morning, before he is dressed, and at night when he is stripped, and there he rolls and tumbles about, to his great delight. If my goddaughter,” adds the Last Century Lady to Doctor Freind, referring to his daughter, “be not a prude, I should recommend the same practice to her.”