The founder of the Blue-Stocking Club, Mrs. Montagu, _née_ Elizabeth Robinson, was another of Walpole’s witty and handsome lady friends. As a girl she was lively, full of fun, yet fond of study. In 1742 she was married to Edward Montagu, M.P., a coal-owner of great wealth. As a girl the Duchess of Portland had called her ’La Petite Fidget’; but after her marriage she became more sedate, and a great power in the literary world. She established the Blue-Stocking Club, of which herself, Mrs. Vesey, Miss Boscawen, Mrs. Carter, Lord Lyttelton, Mr. Pulteney, Mr. Stillingfleet, and Horace Walpole were the first members. The name originally came from Venice, where, in 1400, the Academical Society _delle calze_ had been established, whence the name was transferred to similar associations in France, there called _Bas Bleus_, and from the latter country it was introduced into England. Mrs. Montagu, having been left a widow with £7,000 a year, built herself a mansion, standing in a large garden at the north-west corner of Portman Square, and there the Blue-Stocking Club continued to hold its meetings for a number of years, including all the persons of her time who were celebrated in art, science, or literature, among whom may be mentioned Boswell and Johnson, the latter of whom, in the presence of ladies, somewhat modified his bearish habits. Mrs. Montagu died in 1800, and the house she had built eventually became the town residence of Viscount Portman. Of course, Horace Walpole was acquainted with the Misses Gunning—’those goddesses,’ as Mary Montagu styled them. They were nieces of the first Earl of Mayo, and so got a ready introduction into London society, which literally went raving mad about them. Horace Walpole tells us that even the ’great unwashed’ followed them in crowds whenever they appeared in public: there must have been an extraordinary appreciation of beauty in the rabble—and what a rabble of ruffians it was!—of those days. But London then was no bigger than a provincial town, compared with what it is now. The two ladies speedily found husbands: the Duke of Hamilton married Elizabeth, the younger, after an evening spent in the society of the sisters and their mother at Bedford House, and was in such a hurry about it that he would wait for neither licence nor ring, and, after with some difficulty satisfying the scruples of the parson called upon to celebrate the extempore ceremony, they were married with the ring of a bed-curtain, at half an hour after twelve at night, at Mayfair Chapel. Three weeks afterwards Lord Coventry married her sister, Maria. The Duke of Hamilton dying in 1758, six years after the strange nuptials in Mayfair Chapel, the widow in the following year married Jack Campbell, afterwards Duke of Argyll. Lady Coventry did not wear her coronet long; in 1760 she died, it is said, in consequence of her excessive use of white paint. Her sister, ’twice duchessed,’ survived her many years.