To please others was no such difficult task for her, and she must have known it. Cultivated society was the element in which she was made to move. She was always glad when the time arrived to get into her postchaise, and roll over the fifty-six miles that lay between Sandleford and her house in Hill Street, Berkeley Square. This habitation was at once stately and convenient; one room was furnished in the Chinese style: the walls were lively with pagodas, willow-trees, and simpering celestials. Here she collected around her the witty and the wise. Her _salon_ quickly became the fashion. We find her on one occasion apologizing to a lady for not answering her letter, and explaining that, on the previous day, “the Chinese room was filled by a succession of people from eleven in the morning till eleven at night.” She is said to have introduced the custom—which did not however take permanent root—of giving mid-day breakfasts. Madame du Boccage, a lady of eminence in the French literary world, who happened to be in England in 1750, gives a description of one of them in a letter to her sister Madame Duperron. It appears that bread-and-butter, cakes hot and cold, biscuits of every shape and flavor, formed the solid portion of the feast. Tea, coffee, and chocolate were the beverages provided. The hostess, wearing a white apron, and a straw hat (like those with which porcelain shepherdesses are crowned), stood at the table pouring out the tea. Madame du Boccage was much impressed by the fine table-linen, the gleaming cups and saucers, and the excellence of the tea, which in those days cost about sixteen shillings a pound. But especially did she admire the lady of the house, who deserved, she considered, “to be served at the table of the gods.“ Mrs. Montagu had, all her life, been a student of Shakespeare, and an ardent admirer of his works. Her indignation may be imagined therefore when Voltaire dared to condemn what he was pleased to call _les farces monstrueuses_ of the bard of Avon.[44] It was contended by Voltaire that Corneille was immeasurably superior to Shakespeare as a dramatist, inasmuch as the latter set at nought Aristotle’s unities of time and place, and otherwise violated accepted rules of dramatic composition. That the vigor and freedom which characterise Shakespeare’s genius should be depreciated, and the stilted artificialities of the French school held up to admiration, was more than Mrs. Montagu could stand. She thus denounces the philosopher of Ferney, and his opinions, in a letter to Gilbert West: “Foolish coxcomb! Rules can no more make a poet than receipts a cook. There must be taste, there must be skill. Oh, that we were as sure our fleets and armies could drive the French out of America as that our poets and tragedians can drive them out of Parnassus. I hate to see these tame creatures, taught to pace by art, attack fancy’s sweetest child.”