There were duties connected with her position which Mrs. Montagu as scrupulously fulfilled. Receiving and returning visits was “a great devoir.” Resort to assemblies was a “necessary thing;” the duty of seeing and being seen was an indispensable duty; but she had mental resources which enabled her to pity the “polite world,” which had no way of driving away ennui but by pleasure. If in Hill Street she was of “the quality,” as Chesterfield called them, in the country she was not only what she loved to call herself, a farmer’s wife, but a political economist. At Sandleford we see a poor wretch standing at the door of the mansion. She is hideous from dirt, poverty, and contagious disease born of both. The lady farmer was not only charitable but something besides. “I was very angry with her,” she says, “that she has lately introduced another heir to wretchedness and want. She has not half Hamlet’s delicacies on the question. To be or not to be! The law’s delays are very puny evils to those her offspring must endure. The world affords no law to make her rich, and yet she will increase and multiply over the face of the earth.” Throughout the printed letters, continual examples occur of Mrs. Montagu’s acute observation of character, and of her happy expression when she described it. She not only watched closely, but spoke boldly of the ladies around her, and of their more or less pretty ways. Thus, Mrs. Montagu saw that all the ladies courted Doctor Young, the poet, but she was sure it was only because they had heard he was a genius, and not that they knew he was one. When some misses expressed their delight at a particular ball, she remarked that their delight was probably increased by the absence of Miss Bladen, who became Lord Essex’s second countess, and who was not there to outshine them! “So strong in women,” she said, “was the desire of pleasing, each would have that happy power confined to her own person.” It did not escape her eye that Lady Abercorn and Lady Townshend, “each determining to have the most wit of any person in the company, always chose different parties and different ends of the room.” How gracefully serene is the portrait of the Duchess of Somerset, who did what was civil without intending to be gracious, and who so surprised Mrs. Montagu, in 1749, because the princely state and pride the duchess had so long been used to, had “left her such an easiness of manners.” One of her exceptional touches was when she described the pious Countess of Huntingdon as a “well-meaning fanatic.” That must have been after Gilbert West and Lord Lyttelton had brought her out of the field of Free Inquirers, and the Primate of Ireland had made her of the religion of the Established Church. At that period she would have placed the church above the law, resembling the old Scottish woman of the kirk, who, on pronouncing that to take a walk on the Sabbath was a deadly sin, was reminded that Jesus himself had walked in the corn-fields on the