“We have lately had a very fine public ceremony, the instalment of the new Knights of the Garter at Windsor. The king, assuming the throne of sovereign of the order, gave great lustre to the spectacle. I should have liked to have seen so august a ceremony; and my Lord Bath was so good as to ask me to go to Windsor with him, from his house at Maidenhead Bridge; but Mr. Montagu, not being fond of public shows, and apprehending his lordship offered to go out of complaisance, I declined it, and my lord spent three days here; so it was plain, his politeness to us was his only inducement to go to the instalment. I must own I should have taken some pleasure in being led back into former ages and the days of our great Plantagenets. I have a reverence, too, for the institutions of Chivalry. The qualities of a Knight were valour, liberality, and courtesy, and to be _sans peur et sans reproche_. And though the change of government and manners make this knightly character now appear a little extravagant, the Redresser of wrongs was a respectable title before a regular police and a good system of laws secured the rights and properties of the weak. I hear the late instalment was extremely brilliant. The helmets of the knights were adorned with gems; military honours, indeed, did not sit proudly on their crests; but if they have the virtues suited to the times we live in, we will be contented. The knights of Edward ye Third were, indeed, very great men. The assembly of British Worthies might have disputed personal merit with, perhaps, the greatest Heroes of antiquity, considering them singly and independently; but to enjoy an extensive or a lasting fame, men’s actions must be tyed to great events; then they swim down Fate’s innavigable tyde, otherwise, they soon sink into oblivion.”... In the February of this year, 1762, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had returned to England, after many years of absence. In October, in the same year, she died. Of her appearance on her return, Mrs. Montagu wrote as follows to her sister-in-law at Naples: