town; and, indeed, I think people frighten each other so much when they meet, that there is little pleasure arising from society.... There is not a woman in England, except Lady Brown, that has a song or tune in her head, but, indeed, her ladyship is very unhappy at the suspension of operas.” The death of Mrs. Montagu’s mother, in the following year, drew from her a tender and well-deserved tribute of affection in a touching and simple letter to Mrs. Freind. In 1747, her friend, Mr. Lyttelton, lost his first wife, and wrote a monody on her, for the public ear. The monody walks on very high stilts, and occasionally falls and struggles on the ground. Mrs. Montagu thought it had great merit, and that her friend would be inconsolable; but Lyttelton brought out, the same year, his “Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of St. Paul,” of which Mrs. Montagu was a diligent reader and a constant eulogist. In less than two years, the widower left unfinished a prettily begun epitaph to his Lucy, with whom he had enjoyed six years of conjugal felicity, and married a daughter of Sir Robert Rich. With her came a life of warfare, followed by a treaty by which each party agreed to live at peace with, and wide apart from, the other. Meanwhile, Mrs. Montagu made friendly progresses to princely mansions in various parts of the country. She had hearty welcome at all, from lay and ecclesiastical nobles alike. This did not influence her critical eye. At Wilton, then and now one of the best examples of an English nobleman’s residence, she writes: “As to the statues and bustos, they certainly are very fine, but I think too many. Heroes should not have so many competitors, nor philosophers so much company; a respectable society may be increased into a mob. I should, if they were mine, sell half of their figures to purchase their works, which are, indeed, the images of wise men.”