It would have been sad, if it had been true; but she was severe in her own censure. If she cheerfully plunged into the vortex of fashionable duties, she persistently proclaimed her higher enjoyment of home privileges. She sneered at her own presence wherever two or three fools were gathered together, but her honest ambition was to establish friendships with the wise and the virtuous. Johnson assured her of her “goodness so conspicuous,” and was proud of being asked to use his influence to obtain her support of poor Mrs. Ogle’s benefit concert, as it gratified his vanity that he should be “supposed to be of any importance to Mrs. Montagu.” With respect, at this time, for Johnson, she had a deeper feeling of regard for Burke. “Mr. Burke, a friend of mine.” There is reasonable pride in the assertion, and how tenderly and cleverly she paints her “friend!”—“He is, in conversation and writing, an ingenious and ingenuous man, modest and delicate, and on great and serious subjects full of that respect and veneration which a good mind, and a great one, is sure to feel; he is as good and worthy as he is ingenious.” Her love of books was like her love of friends. Dressed for a ball, she sat down, read through the “Ajax” and the “Philoctetes” of Sophocles, wrote a long critical letter on the two dramas, and, losing her ball, earned her bed and the deep sleep she enjoyed in it. At Tunbridge, she describes the occupation of a single morning as consisting of going to chapel, then to a philosophical lecture, next to hear a gentleman play the viol d’amore, and finally to hold controversy with a Jew and a Quaker. In 1760, she was equally vivacious, in “sad Newcastle.” In September of that year, she writes to Lord Lyttelton, that she was taking up her freedom, by entering into all the diversions of the place. “I was at a musical entertainment yesterday morning, at a concert last night, at a musical entertainment this morning; I have bespoken a play for to-morrow night, and shall go to a ball, on choosing a mayor, on Monday night.” But in the hours of leisure, between these dissipations, she fulfilled all her duties as a woman of business in connection with her steward’s accounts and the coal interests, and devoted the remainder to the study of works in the loftiest walks of literature. “More leisure and fewer hours,” she says, “had possibly made me happier, but my business is to make the best of things as they are.” She ever made the best of two old and wise men who professed, in mirth, to make love to her in all seriousness. The two wise men look, in their correspondence, like two fools. Lord Bath, the wiser of the two, looks more of a fool than Doctor Monsey, and there is something nauseous in the affected playfulness of the aged lovers, and also in the equally affected virginal coyness with which Mrs. Montagu received, encouraged, or put aside their rather audacious gallantry. Her part in these pseudo love-passages was born of her charity.