Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Charles Aldarondo, (no name) and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
Her Life and Letters (1689-1762)
By
To
EDITH AND JOHN CABOURN
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu has her niche in the history of medicine ashaving introduced inoculation from the Near East into England; but herprincipal fame is as a letter-writer.
Of her gifts as a correspondent she was proud, and with reason. It wasin all sincerity that in June, 1726, she wrote to her sister, Lady Mar:"The last pleasures that fell in my way was Madame Sévigné's letters:very pretty they are, but I assert, without the least vanity, that minewill be full as entertaining forty years hence. I advise you, therefore,to put none of them to the use of waste paper." And again, later in theyear, she said half-humorously to the same correspondent: "I writ to yousome time ago a long letter, which I perceive never came to your hands:very provoking; it was certainly a chef d'oeuvre of a letter, andworthy any of the Sévigné's or Grignan's, crammed with news." That LadyMary's belief in herself was well founded no one has disputed. EvenHorace Walpole, who detested her and made attacks on her wheneverpossible, said that "in most of her letters the wit and style aresuperior to any letters I have ever read but Madame de Sévigné's." Avery pleasant tribute from one who had a goodly conceit of himself as aletter-writer.
Walpole, as a correspondent, was perhaps more sarcastic and more witty;Cowper undoubtedly more tender and more gentle; but Lady Mary hadqualities all her own. She had powers of observation and the gift ofdescription, which qualities are especially to be remarked in theletters she wrote when abroad with her husband on his Mission to thePorte. She had an ironic wit which gave point to the many societyscandals she narrated, a happy knack of gossip, and a style so easy asto make reading a pleasure.
Some of the incidents which Lady Mary retails with so much humour may beaccepted as not outraging the conventions of the early eighteenthcentury when it was customary to call a spade a spade; when gallantrywas gallantry indeed, and the pursuit of it openly conducted. What isnot mentioned by those who have written about her is that she waspossessed of a particularly unsavoury strain of impropriety whichoutraged even the canons of her age. Some twenty years after her death,it was mentioned in the Gentleman's Magazine that Dr. Young, theauthor of Night Thoughts, had a little before his death destroyed agreat number of her letters, assigning as a reason of his doing so thatthey were too indecent for public inspection. Only the other day I hadconfirmation of this from a distinguished man of letters who wrote tome: "I have somewhere hidden away a copy of a letter by Lady MaryWortley Montagu, which was sent to me by a well-known collector aboutthirty-five years ago, because he couldn't destroy it and wouldn't forworlds be found dead with it in his possession—so terrific is it incharacter. I'll tell you about it some day when we meet: I can't writeit. In any case you couldn't use it or even refer to it…. I supposethat my friend quite felt that the document, however objectionable,should not, on literary grounds, be destroyed. What my executors will