Mrs. Montagu hated no man, but she thoroughly despised Warburton. The way he mauled Shakespeare by explaining him, excited her scornful laughter; the way in which he marred Christianity by defending it, excited much more than angry contempt. “The levity shocks me, the indecency displeases me, the _grossièreté_ disgusts me. I love to see the doctrine of Christianity defended by the spirit of Christianity.” Bishop Warburton and some country parsons were equally silly in her mind. Of a poor riddle, she says, “A country parson could not puzzle his parish with it, even if he should endeavour to explain it in his next Sunday’s sermon. Though I have known some of them explain a thing till all men doubted it.” From the rule by which she measured all men, she did not except any one of her brothers: and never did sister love her brothers more tenderly and reasonably. Her brother William, the clergyman, was restless in temper from excess of love of ease. “My brother Robinson,” she wrote to her sister, Mrs. Scott, in 1755, “is emulating the great Diogenes ... he flies the delights of London, and leads a life of such privacy and seriousness, as looks to the beholders like wisdom, but, for my part, no life of inaction deserves that name.” Other characters she strikes off in a single sentence. That referring to Sir Charles Williams is a very good sample from an overflowing measure. “Sir Charles,” she said, “is still so flighty, that had he not always been a wit, he would still pass for a madman!” When she refers to Lord Hyde’s printed, but never acted comedy, “The Mistakes, or the Happy Resentment,” and says, “I suppose you will read the play, as it is by so great a man,” she was probably thinking of Miss Tibbs, who, “it is well known, always showed her good breeding by devoting all her attention to the people of highest rank in the company.” Mrs. Montagu was as clever at generalities as when sketching individuals and special peculiarities. The numerous Jews at Tunbridge Wells, in 1745, she describes as having “worse countenances than their friend Pontius Pilate in a bad tapestry-hanging.” Good farmer’s wife as she said of herself, and also very fond of refined luxury, she laughed in her letters at those persons who built palaces in gardens of beauty, and left, as she said, nothing rude and waste but their minds; nothing harsh and unpolished but their tempers. To her, no knowledge came amiss. Amid all the gaieties of the life at Bath, she took interest in the chemistry of every-day life. During one of her visits, she was initiated into the mysteries of making malt! Her very affectations, as they were called, sprung from her endowments. Her learning and reading, and intercourse with scholars and thinkers, furnished her with extraordinary figures and illustrations that were applied to very ordinary uses.