Among the ladies who were neighbours of Horace Walpole, we must not omit Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who lived for some years in a house on the south side of the road leading to Twickenham Common. She may justly be considered as one of the witty, if not of the pretty, women of Walpole’s time. He detested her. Probably he was somewhat jealous of her, for her letters from Constantinople on Turkish life and society earned her the sobriquet of the ’Female Horace Walpole.’ He writes of her thus whilst she was living at Florence: ’She is laughed at by the whole town. Her dress, her avarice, and her impudence must amaze anyone.... She wears a foul mob, that does not cover her greasy black locks, that hang loose, never combed or curled; an old mazarine blue wrapper, that gapes open and discovers a canvas petticoat. Her face swelled violently on one side, and partly covered with white paint, which for cheapness she has bought so coarse that you would not use it to wash a chimney.’ In another letter he describes her dress as consisting of ’a groundwork of dirt, with an embroidery of filthiness.’ When he wrote of her then, she was about fifty years of age, and seems to have retained none of the beauty which distinguished her in her earlier years. She was not only coarse in looks, but in her speech and writings, which shock modern fastidiousness. She was not the woman to please Horace Walpole, who, even when in the seventies, liked nothing better than acting as squire or cicerone to fine ladies. Lady Mary was not one of them. She was, in fact, what we now should call a regular Bohemian; and was it to be wondered at? She had been introduced into that sort of life when she was a girl only eight years old by her own father, Evelyn, Earl of Kingston. He was a member of the Kitcat Club, whose chief occupation was the proposing and toasting the beauties of the day. One evening the Earl took it into his head to nominate his daughter. She was sent for in a chaise, and introduced to the company in dirty Shire Lane in a grimy chamber, reeking with foul culinary smells and stale tobacco-smoke, and elected by acclamation. The gentlemen drank the little lady’s health upstanding; and feasting her with sweets, and passing her round with kisses, at once inscribed her name with a diamond on a drinking-glass. ’Pleasure,’ she says, ’was too poor a word to express my sensations. They amounted to ecstasy. Never again throughout my whole life did I pass so happy an evening.’ Of course, the child could not perceive the hideousness of the whole proceeding and its surroundings: if the kisses were seasoned with droppings of snuff from the noses above, which otherwise were not always very clean—even at the beginning of this century Lord Kenyon, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, was an utter stranger to the luxury of a pocket-handkerchief, and had no delicacy about avowing it—it did not detract from the sweetness of the bon-bons with which she was regaled.