She was resolved to institute _réunions_ where conversion and literature should entertain, and cards and gambling should never be seen. The result was that quite a new intellectual element appeared in Society. She brought such minds into contact as Mrs. Vesey, Mrs. Thrale, Mrs. Barbauld, Hannah More, Lucy Aikin, Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire, Johnson, Pulteney, Earl of Bath, the first Lord Lyttelton, Horace Walpole, Dr. Burney, Garrick, and Reynolds, and the force of such gatherings was bound to influence both men and women. [Illustration: MARIA, COUNTESS OF COVENTRY, née GUNNING.] In _Jane Austen and Her Times_ (G. E. Mitton), a delightful volume recently published, there is an interesting picture of the habits of the day: “The epoch was one of change and enlargement in other than geographical directions. In the thirty years before Jane Austen’s birth an immense improvement had taken place in the position of women. Mrs. Montagu, in 1750, had made bold strokes for the freedom and recognition of her sex. The epithet ‘blue stocking,’ which has survived with such extraordinary tenacity, was at first given, not to the clever women who attended Mrs. Montagu’s informal receptions, but to her men friends, who were allowed to come in the grey or blue worsted stockings of daily life, instead of the black silk considered _de rigueur_ for parties. Up to this time, personal appearance and cards had been the sole resources for a leisured dame of the upper classes, and the language of gallantry was the only one considered fitting for her to hear. By Mrs. Montagu’s efforts it was gradually recognised that a woman might not only have sense herself, but might prefer it should be spoken to her; and that because the minds of women had long been uncultivated they were not on that account unworthy of cultivation. Hannah More describes Mrs. Montagu as ‘not only the finest genius, but the finest lady I ever saw ... her form (for she has no body) is delicate even to fragility; her countenance the most animated in the world; the sprightly vivacity of fifteen, with the judgment and experience of a Nestor.’” It is amusing to find that the struggles of a century and a half ago are still unsolved to-day, half the pleasure of visiting being knocked on the head by the uncertainty of the rightful proportion of the tips to follow. Jane Austen herself alludes to her difficulties: “I am in great distress whether I shall give Richis half a guinea or only five shillings when I go away.” In a letter to the _Times_ in 1795, the vexed subject of tips is discussed: