On September 19 Mrs. Montagu set out from Hill Street on her journey to
Northumberland, starting in a postchaise and picking up Ned and her own
horses at Baldock, and so reached Buckden on the same day. She writes
to Mr. Montagu--
“I call’d on Dr. Young at Welling and staid about two hours with
him, he received me with great cordiality, and I think appears in
better health than ever I saw him. His house is happily opposite to
a church yard, which is to him a fine prospect; he has taught his
imagination to sport with skulls like the grave-digger in Hamlet.
He invited me to stay all night, and if my impatience to see you
had not impell’d me on, I had been tempted to it. His conversation
has always something in it very delightful; in the first place it
is animated by the warmest benevolence, then his imagination soars
above the material world, some people would say his conversation
is not natural. I say it is natural of him to be unnatural, that
is out of the ordinary course of things. It would be easier for
him to give you a catalogue of the Stars than an inventory of the
Household furniture he uses every day. The busy world may say what
it pleases, but some men were made for speculation, metaphysical
men, like jars and flower pots, make good furniture for a cabinet
tho’ useless in the kitchen, the pantry and the Dairy.”
In a fragment of a letter to Lord Lyttelton, Mrs. Montagu describes her
visit to Dr. Young. She had heard “the Dialogues of the Dead praised
to the highest degree, and with taste and judgment in a most delicate
sense of their moral merits.”
Through Mrs. Montagu, Dr. Monsey sends to Dr. Young a powder for his
rheumatism. From “Hog Magog” on September 26, Dr. Monsey writes a long
letter to Lord Lyttelton, describing his visit to Tunbridge to see
“dear Amadissa,” meaning Mrs. Montagu. In it he says--
“It may be new to your Lordship tho’ not strange, that the Earl
of Bath is fall’n desperately in love with one who seems not
insensible of his passion, and I think ’tis time for you and I
to look about us, for an Earl is better than a Baron or a quack
Doctor ... it is impossible for me to tell your Lordship with what
warmth he talk’d to me about her, and so now there are 3 fools of
us. ‘She is the most extraordinary woman in the world’ with a nod
of the head and a grave face, ‘she beats a french Duchess with an
hard name all to pieces, upon my word, Doctor, she is----’ ‘Ay,
so she is, my Lord, but neither I nor you know what.’ ‘Suppose
we say angel.’ ‘No,’ says I, ‘Devil, for she leads us all into
temptation.’”
On receipt of this, Lord Lyttelton wrote to Mrs. Montagu, and says--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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