Directly after this, West was ordered to Tunbridge Wells, where he was
accompanied by Lady Cobham, Miss Speed, and his wife. He writes to Mrs.
Montagu that he hopes she will like a long stay in the country, as its
tranquillity will not
“produce the same effect which an Admiral of my acquaintance found
from the tranquillity of his friend’s house in the country, to
which coming directly from his ship, where he had been so long
accustomed to noise and bustle as to be grown fond of it, said,
after having passed a restless night, ‘Pox on this house, ’tis so
quiet there is no sleeping in it.’”
To this letter she answers--
“Mr. Montagu has been studiously disposed ever since we came to
Sandleford, so that I pass seven or eight hours every day entirely
alone. Five months are to pass before I return to the Land of the
Living, but I can amuse myself in the regions of the dead: if it
rains so that I cannot walk in the garden, Virgil will carry me
into the Elysian fields, or Milton into Paradise.”
[Page heading: MR. TORRIANO’S MARRIAGE]
Mention is also made of Sam Torriano’s engagement to Miss Scudamore,
“who is said to have been handsome, and it was on both sides a marriage
of inclination. He has delicacy enough to make him very happy or very
miserable, and restlessness enough to be very uneasy in a state too
insipid to allow of neither.”
Mrs. Montagu might well make this remark on Torriano’s marriage, as
her friend Sir George Lyttelton’s[86] second matrimonial contract had
by mutual consent ended in a separation. In a former letter it will
be remembered that the haughty tone and unpleasant manners of the
lady were commented on. It was a case of incompatibility of temper
and thought, and a constant imagination of bad health on her part.
Lady Lyttelton was a great friend of the Wests, and from a letter of
Lyttelton’s to West of this year it is evident that a little coldness,
which did not endure long, had sprung up between West and his friend.
[86] With Miss Rich, daughter of Field-Marshal Sir Robert Rich.
[Page heading: MR. WEST ILL]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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