The famous mathematician to whom Mrs. Montagu refers in the above letter was William Emerson, of whom Mr. Montagu is believed to have been the original patron. Mr. Montagu may, in some degree, have helped that poor and eccentric scholar, but the energies of the once idle Yorkshire dreamer were really developed by an injustice. He had married the niece of a clergyman, who basely cheated the bride out of her dowry of £500. Whereupon the proud and angry husband sent back the whole of his wife’s wardrobe, with the message that he would “scorn to be beholden to such a fellow for a rag!” When Mr. Montagu married Elizabeth Robinson, Emerson had just ready for the press the work which gave him a place in the highest rank of mathematicians—his “Doctrine of Fluxions.” The distinction neither affected his eccentricity nor softened his audacity. He was wont to sign his mathematical solutions with a name that might have made Minerva breathless—“Philofluentimechanelgegeomastrolonzo,” and he lived to shock Mrs. Edward Montagu by snapping his fingers at the Royal Society, and damning the fellows and their fellowships! George Grenville and Burke are among the best samples of the men whom Mrs. Montagu appreciated, and who could thoroughly appreciate Mrs. Montagu. Burke has spoken in the highest terms of both. Of the statesman who, five years before his death, resigned all his offices, Burke said: “With a masculine understanding and a stout and resolute heart, he had an application undissipated and unwearied. He took public business, not as a duty he was to fulfil, but as a pleasure he was to enjoy; and he seemed to have no delight out of the house, except in such things as in some way related to the business that was to be done within it. If he was ambitious, I will say this for him, that his ambition was of a noble and generous strain. It was to raise himself not by the low, pimping politics of a court, but to win his way to power through the laborious gradations of public service, and to secure himself a well-earned rank in Parliament, by a thorough knowledge of its constitution and in perfect practice in all its business.” Mrs. Montagu might justly be proud of the good opinion of a friend who could express such a judgment of another friend like Grenville, for whom she herself entertained the highest esteem.