The vast fortune which had been thus from various sources accumulated, was spent by the Earl of Montague in a manner peculiarly befitting his lofty station. He could sustain his rank with splendour and dignity, and yet think his table honoured, not encumbered, by the presence of learned men, of no rank, but whose talents shed upon their well-judging patron a reflected lustre which wealth could not give. At his magnificent residence in Bloomsbury-house, now the British Museum, the ingenious St. Evremond, and other eminent foreigners, were seen mingling with the wits and artists of the time, in saloons and halls, to garnish which the arts of painting and sculpture had been called into requisition, and liberally remunerated. The taste of this excellent and high-minded nobleman for architecture, for gardening, as well as for the other arts which embellish, was displayed both in his abode in London and his estate in Northamptonshire. His style of living corresponded with his lofty ideas, and equalled, if it did not excel, that of the most princely of his contemporaries. From this noble stock sprang John Montague, Viscount Monthermer, who became the son-in-law of Marlborough. An intimacy had for some time subsisted between the Earl his father, and the Duchess, his future mother-in-law.[10] But the Lady Mary Churchill, his destined bride, when the match was proposed to her, proved averse from complying with the wishes of her parents, having already, as report alleged, “set her eyes and her heart upon another young gentleman, a very handsome youth.” “Yet she must,” adds Cunningham, “have obeyed her mother’s commands immediately, had not an accident happened, which proved very lamentable to the Marlborough family.” The event to which he alludes was the death of Lord Blandford; and the marriage of the reluctant young lady was suspended until the period of mourning had been duly observed. It then, however, took place; for it was not the custom of the day to take into account the affections, in the calculations which were made in matrimonial contracts. Nor were the family of the young bridegroom likely to relax in their efforts to promote a favourable issue. Such is the mutability of human affections, and the folly of our most ardent desires, that Marlborough appears afterwards to have disliked, and the Duchess to have despised, though without adequate reason, the man whom she at this time preferred for her son-in-law. “All his talents,” thus she wrote of his lordship thirty-seven years afterwards, “lie in things natural in boys of fifteen years old, and he is about two-and-fifty—to get people into his garden and wet them with squirts, and to invite people to his country-houses, and put things into their beds to make them itch, and twenty such pretty fancies like these.”[11] Such was her opinion of this son-in-law; how far it was guided by prejudice will be seen presently.