the chamber, and set up altar against altar.” Johnson had many reasons for feeling grateful to Mrs. Montagu; it is therefore satisfactory to know that, at the time of his death, he and she were on cordial terms again. Not only could she dispute with the learned, and frolic with the fashionable, in town; but at Sandleford Mrs. Montagu kept the farm accounts, and rattled away glibly about agriculture. Then again at Denton, her husband’s place in Northumberland, where he owned extensive coal-mines, it was she, not he, who visited the pits with the overseer, and discussed the prospects of trade. Her husband’s apathy to what went on around him, and disinclination to move, irritated her, as is evident from the slightly petulant remarks she lets drop thereupon in her letters. She lost all patience with her brother William, the clergyman, who preferred a life of easy retirement to going ahead in his profession. “He leads,” she writes, “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.” In 1774, her husband’s health was visibly failing. He scarcely left the house, sought his bed at five o’clock in the evening, and did not leave it till near noon. He died the following year, bequeathing all his property, real and personal, to his widow. She, after an interval of seclusion at Sandleford, proceeded to the North, and busied herself in visiting her coal-mines, and feasting her tenants on a liberal scale. Her colliery people she blew out with boiled beef and rice-pudding. “It is very pleasant,” she remarks, “to see how the poor things cram themselves, and the expense is not great. We buy rice cheap, and skimmed milk and coarse beef serve the occasion.” Having projected various schemes of charity and usefulness among her vassals in Northumberland, she proceeded to Yorkshire, and with the state of affairs on her property there she was equally pleased. A prolonged drought, it is true, had this summer burnt the country to a brown crust; not a blade of grass was visible; cattle had to be driven miles to water. Yet her tenants asked no indulgence nor favor, but paid their rents like men, hoping philosophically that the next season would be better. The following year, she was moving in a different scene. She was in Paris, where her reputation as a _bel esprit_ of the first rank was established. The doors of the greatest houses were thrown open to receive her, and she was hurried hither and thither in a manner bewildering.