We can dispense no doubt with Mrs Montagu's _Essay_, in which she defends Shakespeare against the rash onslaught of Voltaire. We may even forget her three _Dialogues of the Dead_, although Mrs Modish speaks with the genuine accent of the polite world: "Indeed, Mr Mercury, I cannot have the pleasure of waiting upon you now, I am engaged, absolutely engaged." (There was a fourth Dialogue returned to her by Lord Lyttelton in which Cleopatra tells Berenice only what every woman knows.) But we cannot forgo without loss to ourselves her letters to the Duchess of Portland and many other friends, which are lively, witty, and entertaining, and second in her time only to those of that prince of letter-writers, Horace Walpole. Mrs Montagu's friends did their best to turn her head. Mrs Carter writes to her of "the elegant brilliancy of my dearest Mrs Montagu," and not content with prose as a medium of praise, sends her an ode which leads up by a strong crescendo to these two verses: "O blest with ev'ry talent, ev'ry Grace Which native Fire, or happy Art supplies, How short a Period, how confined a Space, Must bound thy shining Course below the Skies! For wider Glories, for immortal Fame, Were all those talents, all those Graces given: And may thy life pursue that noblest aim, The final plaudit of approving Heav'n." Mrs Carter thought that Dr Johnson's preface to Shakespeare was "very defective," and she adds to Mrs Montagu, certain that her Latin will be understood without the aid of a dictionary: "Res integra tibi reservatur." Elsewhere she writes: "you, who have proved yourself the most accurate and judicious of all his commentators." This opinion was shared by the entire circle of Blue-stockings, and even outside that charmed circle the Reverend Montagu Pennington, nephew of Mrs Carter and godson of Mrs Montagu, felt that she was guilty of something like mortal sin in omitting to defend the British Public against the pernicious influence of Lord Chesterfield's _Letters to his Son_.