When she found herself among the great coal-owners, she was neither happy nor pleased. They could only talk of coal, and of those who had been made or ruined by it. “As my mind is not naturally set to this tune,” she wrote to Mr. Benjamin Stillingfleet, “I should often be glad to change it for a song from one of your Welsh bards.” She, however, intended to turn the occasion to intellectual profit by exploring the country, and studying its beauties and natural productions, but a little fainting fit put an end to this design. An overzealous maid went to her aid, when fainting, with a bottle of eau-de-luce, but as she emptied the contents into Mrs. Montagu’s throat, instead of applying it outwardly for refreshment, the lady was nigh upon being then and there deprived of upwards of forty years of life. She happily recovered, and by and by she speaks of herself, in London, as “going wherever two or three fools were gathered together, to assemblies, visiting-days etc. Twenty-four idle hours, without a leisure one among them!” So she said; but an order to Mrs. Denoyer, at the Golden Bible, Lisle Street, for a hundred of the best pens and half a ream of the finest and thinnest quarto paper, indicates how many hours of the twenty-four were employed. She thought, or she affected to think, that she grew idler as she grew older. In one of her letters to old Doctor Monsey,—a grotesque savage and scholar, who, in lugubrious jokery, wrote love-letters (which she pretended to take seriously) at fourscore,—she said, in September, 1757, just before her thirty-seventh birthday: “I shall write to you again when I am thirty-seven; but I am now engaged in a sort of death-bed repentance for the idleness of the thirty-sixth year of my age!” She certainly took a wrong view of her case when she further said: “Having spent the first part of my life in female vanities, the rest in domestic employments, I seem as if I had been measuring ribbons in a milliner’s, or counting pennyworths of figs and weighing sugar-candy in a grocer’s shop all my life.” This was no affectation. “If you envy me,” she added, “or know any one who does, pray tell them this sad truth. Nothing can be more sad. Nothing can be more true.”