sacred phrases appropriated to the honour of the Deity are applied to a mortal of good quality. As I am naturally emulous, I cannot but endeavour, in imitation of this lady, to be the inventor, or, at least, the first producer of a new kind of dedication, very different from hers and most others, since it has not a word but what the author religiously thinks in it. It may serve for almost any book, either prose or verse, that has been, is, or shall be published, and might run in this manner :

THE AUTHOR TO HIMSELF

Most honoured Sir,

These labours, upon many considerations, so properly belong to none as to you: first, as it was your most earnest desire alone that could prevail upon me to make them public: Then, as I am secure (from that constant indulgence you have ever shown to all that is mine) that no man will so readily take them into protection, or so zealously defend them. Moreover, there is none can so soon discover the beauties; and there are some parts which it is possible few beside yourself are capable of understanding. Sir, the honour, affection, and value I have for you are beyond expression; as great, I am sure, or greater, than any man else can bear you. As for any defects which others may pretend to discover in you, I do faithfully declare I was never able to perceive them; and doubt not but those persons are actuated purely by a spirit of malice or envy, the inseparable attendants on shining merit and parts, such as I have always esteemed yours to be. It may perhaps be looked upon as a kind of violence to modesty, to say this to you in public; but you may believe me, it is no more than I have a thousand times thought of you in private. Might I follow the impulse of my soul, there is no subject I could launch into with more pleasure than your panegyric. But since something is due to modesty, let me conclude by telling you, that there is nothing so much I desire as to know you more thoroughly than I have yet the happiness of doing. I may then hope to be capable to do you some real service; but till then can only assure you that I shall continue to be, as I am more than any man alive, dearest Sir, your affectionate Friend, and the greatest of your Admirers.

(From The Guardian, 16th March 1713.)

LADY MARY WORTLEY MÓNTAGU

[Mary Pierrepont was born in Covent Garden, London, in the spring of the year 1689. Her parents were the Hon. Evelyn Pierrepont, who in 1690 succeeded as Earl of Kingston, and afterwards became Marquis of Dorchester and Duke of Kingston, and his first wife, Lady Mary, a daughter of William, third Earl of Denbigh. Though practically self-educated, she was at an early age celebrated for her acquirements and love of learning. When fourteen years old she attracted the attention of Mr. Edward Wortley, the eldest son of a gentleman of fortune, Mr. Sidney Wortley Montagu. A correspondence long carried on between them led to an offer of marriage and, differences as to settlements having arisen, to a clandestine marriage (in the latter part of August 1712), followed shortly afterwards by an elopement. Early in 1716 Mr. Wortley was appointed ambassador to the Porte, and started for Constantinople from Vienna in January 1717 accompanied by his wife and infant son. They returned to England in August of the following year.

In 1739 Lady Mary left England for the Continent, and never returned to England during her husband's lifetime; nor did he visit her on either of the two occasions of his going abroad. As they continued to correspond in terms of mutual confidence and regard, her reasons for going and remaining abroad are matter of conjecture only. She resided chiefly at Lovere, but also stayed much at Venice, where, in 1761, she received the news of her husband's death. She at once left for England, where she arrived in January 1762, and where she died on the 21st August following, at her house in George Street, Hanover Square.]

"I NEVER studied anything in my life, and have always (at least from fifteen) thought the reputation of learning a misfortune to a woman." Thus wrote, when seventy years of age and beyond a temptation against which even the cleverest women are not always proof, the temptation of saying a thing for the sake of saying it, the "Lady Mary" whom now as then it is impossible to designate by any longer assortment of names. The remark was true in the main, but at the same time (if it is permissible to use one of those French phrases, to which she so much objected in the style of Lord Bolingbroke) tant soit peu rash. As for the depth of her studies, that is of course a relative affair; in her young days

blue stockings proper had not yet been invented; and, with all her effervescence, she was far too much of a lady (indeed, of a grand lady) to give herself airs. But she certainly was at the pains of corroborating the report that as a child she had laboriously taught herself Latin during a long succession of solitary days spent in her father's library, where she was supposed to have merely gratified an early love for novels and romances which grew into a lifelong passion. To be sure, she never attained to a real command over any language but her own; although that is something, and a something not always achieved by a strictly vernacular discipline. But she at all events entered into the spirit of more than one foreign tongue; she understood Italian, and wrote it as well as Horace Walpole; she composed very passably in French, although she may have been perhaps a trifle bold in essaying a commentary in his own idiom on one of the maxims of La Rochefoucauld; she showed something more than the mere traveller's enthusiasm when gazing upon the Troad and the ruins of Carthage; and who, except Sir William Jones, ever attempted to control her translations from Turkish erotic poetry? These literary excursions in point of fact gave a sort of catholicity to her taste in verse, which was facile in itself and flexible to the liberal notions of an age less rigorous in its canons than we are sometimes given to understand in literary handbooks. If she could imitate, as well as parody Pope, she was even more successful in the vein of Gay, and had, I fear, some inclination towards the style of Sir Charles Hanbury Williams. In prose, which she mostly wrote with the object of pleasing others and always with that of amusing herself, she is hardly ever anything but original and delightful.

It is, I fear, matter of fact that Lady Mary suffered through life from her reputation for learning and letters; however much she might protest against the impeachment. It was not her fault that as a young girl she attracted by her talents as well as by her charms the admiration of Mr. Edward Wortley, whose methods of conduct whether as a lover or as a husband need not here be discussed. After her marriage she might possibly have acquiesced in the inevitable, and have contented herself with the rather trying lot of remaining the sympathetic wife of a very superior man. Her excellent sketch entitled an Account of the Court of George the First at his Accession is thought to have been put together at a later date than her husband's companion

notes On the State of affairs when the King entered; if so, there was obviously a time when she could refrain from the use of her standish even when her powers of observation were as keen as ever. But to persons born for prose composition self-restraint is one thing, and a heaven-sent opportunity is another. Such an opportunity was to Lady Mary her husband's mission to Constantinople, which enabled him to render himself useful, and her to make herself famous.

It is true that the Travels of an English Lady in Europe, Asia, and Africa, were not published till after Lady Mary's death (in 1763), under circumstances in some measure mysterious, and that an additional volume published four years later was in all probability spurious. It has, moreover, been demonstrated with tolerable certainty that the letters comprised in the Travels were not those originally written by Lady Mary from the East, but portions of her Diary afterwards distributed by her among her former actual or probable correspondents. Yet there cannot be any doubt but that during the embassy she wrote many letters in a vein entirely her own to divers private friends, and that these were, like Shakespeare's Sonnets, handed about among them with a curiosity of which it is difficult to conceive in days when social as well as political celebrities convey their first impressions of distant countries through the medium of the daily press. Lady Mary's Turkish letters (for we may fairly designate the whole series by the most novel and most characteristic portion of it) unmistakeably possess the irresistible charm of first impressions; nor are their merits exhausted by this particular kind of directness. She compared manners, and that which lies at the root of manners, with a pointed simplicity such as philosophers and historians frequently neglect to their cost, and after which mere masters of style, including Prosper Mérimée himself, sometimes toil in vain. She furthermore possessed the power of telling a short story, introduced in the way of illustration with a terse distinctness worthy of the highest praise; while, within the limits of the range of her imagination, her descriptions were invariably both lively and lucid. I have attempted, in the extracts given below from this famous series of Letters, to furnish an example of the use which she made of her gifts in both directions.

What has more recently been published of her correspondence during her later years, comprises a large variety of letters written by her at home or abroad, chiefly addressed to her daughter Lady