[140] Walpole’s account of him in dispute is less flattering. ‘He coloured; all his round features squeezed themselves into sharp angles; he screwed up his button-mouth and [rapped] his snuff-box.... I well knew his vanity, even about his ridiculous face and person, but thought he had too much sense to avow it so palpably.’ Letters 11. 376; 27 January 1781. Gibbon avoided disputes with Johnson, and Boswell (Life 2. 348) assumed that he feared ‘a competition of abilities.’
[141] Lettres à Walpole 3. 343, 351, and 376.
[142] Private Lettres 1. 312; 16 June 1777.
[143] Lettres à Walpole 3. 336.
[144] Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Works 2. 178; 30 September 1776.
[145] Miscellaneous Works 1. 312; 16 June 1777.
[146] She wrote him in January 1777: ‘Votre entretien, Monsieur, a toujours été un grand plaisir de ma vie, car vous réunissez l’intérêt pour les petites choses, l’enthousiasme pour les grandes, l’abondance des idées, à l’attention pour celles des autres, et une légère causticité, âme de la conversation, à l’indulgence du moment, la sûreté du caractère et le courage de l’amitié.’ Gibbon, Miscellaneous Works 2. 193. Madame du Deffand applied to Gibbon’s conversation a phrase of Fontenelle’s, ‘forte de choses.’ Lettres à Walpole 3. 338; 27 May 1777.
[147] ‘C’est le ton de nos beaux esprits: il n’y a que des ornements, de la parure, du clinquant, et point du fond ... il a, si je ne me trompe, une grande ambition de célébrité; il brigue à force ouverte la faveur de tous nos beaux esprits.’ Lettres à Walpole 3. 357; 10 August 1777.
[148] Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Works 2. 247; 21 April 1781.
[149] Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Works 2. 214; 12 November 1777.
[150] Nicholas Breton’s Pilgrimage to Paradise, quoted by Miss Young.
[151] These and the like illustrations are drawn from Miss Frances Young’s Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, London 1912.
[152] Epigram 94.
[153] Life and Letters of John Donne 1. 212. Her ‘refining’ influence on Donne’s mind and judgment is particularly noted in his second Letter to the Countess of Bedford.
[154] Professor Grierson attributes to her the poem beginning,
See his edition of Donne’s poems, 2. cxliv.
[155] Twicknam Garden.
[156] Gosse 2. 79; 1651.
[157] This subject is pleasantly discussed by Professor Fletcher in his Religion of Beauty in Woman, ‘Précieuses at the Court of Charles I,’ but his discussion shows how inimical was the new movement to anything like a true patronage of letters.
[158] Thus there is no suggestion of the salon about such a figure as the Duchess of Newcastle.
[159] Seventeenth Century Studies, p. 208.
[160] To ‘Berenice,’ in Familiar Letters, London 1697; 1. 147; 30 December 1658.
[161] On the Death of Mrs. Katherine Philips. In his Ode on Orinda’s Poems the lady’s descent is traced from Boadicea. Rowe, in his Epistle to Daphnis, declares that she soared as high as Corneille ‘and equalled all his fame.’ Dryden compares her with Mrs. Killigrew. Cowley may perhaps have owed more than the rest to her. The following reference to him in her letters seems to show that she had been of real service to him: ‘I am very glad of Mr. Cowley’s success, and will concern myself so much as to thank your ladyship for your endeavour in it.’ (To Berenice, Familiar Letters 1. 143; 25 June [1758?].)
[162] Discourse, p. 38.
[163] Works of Saint Évremond, English translation, 2d edition, London 1728; 2. 247.
[164] Ib. 2. 299.
[165] Her beauty was celebrated by Waller in The Triple Combat. Lely painted her portrait.
[166] See Dr. Upham’s ‘English Femmes Savantes at the End of the Seventeenth Century,’ in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, April 1913. This is a fairly exhaustive treatment of the subject, and reveals a development of ‘feminism’ in England parallel in some respects with that in France. As the movement, however, reveals no attempt to centre literary activity in salons, the article must be regarded as treating a different aspect of the general subject from the one here dealt with.
[167] So Madame du Deffand told Walpole. Walpole’s Letters 10. 28.
[168] Guests were not necessarily received in the sleeping-room. The adjoining dressing-room was often utilized for the purpose. See Colman’s Man of Business (1774), opening of Act 2. The levee should be compared with Mme. de Rambouillet’s more intimate receptions, where a seat near the bedside, in the ruelle or lane between bed and wall, was the place of honour, as being nearest to the hostess while she reclined in state.
Morning informality became so popular in Paris that ladies and gentlemen of quality appeared at lectures, ‘même en robe de chambre’ (Roberts’ Memoirs of Hannah More 2. 17). Cf. Goldsmith (Citizen of the World, Letter 77), ‘the modern manner of some of our nobility receiving company in their morning gowns.’
[169] As early as the days of the Spectator, Addison deplored the custom, introduced by travelled ladies, of ‘receiving gentlemen in their bed-rooms.’
[170] Probably, as Hill notes, Mme. de Boufflers; cf. above, p. 53.
[171] Boswell’s Life 2. 118; cf. 3. 207.
[172] Boswell’s Life 5. 395; here the word levee is probably loosely employed for a morning conversazione.
[173] Citizen of the World, Letter 104.
[174] Cf. Boswell’s Life of Johnson 2. 318.
[175] Diary of Mme. D’Arblay 5. 80-81.
[176] Letters (1770) 1. 7; 8 April 1750.
[177] Letters 8. 437.
[178] Roberts’ Memoirs of More 1. 395.
[179] Correspondence of Mrs. Delany 6. 229; 7 September 1784.
[180] Diary for 10 May 1773; M. Forbes’ Life of Beattie, p. 75.
[181] Hannah More’s piquant description of an assembly is worth quoting in full:
‘On Monday I was at a very great assembly at the Bishop of Saint Asaph’s. Conceive to yourself one hundred and fifty or two hundred people met together, dressed in the extremity of the fashion; painted as red as bacchanals; poisoning the air with perfumes; treading on each other’s gowns; making the crowd they blame; not one in ten able to get a chair; protesting they are engaged to ten other places; and lamenting the fatigue they are not obliged to endure; ten or a dozen card-tables, crammed with dowagers of quality, grave ecclesiastics, and yellow admirals; and you have an idea of an assembly.’ Roberts’ Memoirs of More 1. 242; cf. ib. 1. 311.
[182] Other contemporary descriptions of the salon will be found elsewhere in this volume. Still others—in general more fragmentary—may be consulted in Frances Brooke’s Excursion 1. 142, Roberts’ Memoirs of More 2. 22-23; 1. 92-93; 174; 317.
[183] Horace Walpole’s experiences in the English salons at Turin and Florence may be consulted in the first volume of his Letters. ‘Only figure the coalition of prudery, debauchery, sentiment, history, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and metaphysics; all, except the second, understood by halves, by quarters, or not at all’ 1. 82; 31 July 1740.
[184] This was an important matter with some of the bluestockings, as the following quotation from Hannah More may show: ‘I never knew a great party turn out so pleasantly as the other night at the Pepys’s. There was all the pride of London—every wit and every wit-ess ... but the spirit of the evening was kept up on the strength of a little lemonade till past eleven, without cards, scandal, or politics.’ Roberts’ Memoirs of More 1. 208.
Johnson’s opposition to anything of the sort is shown by his remark on ‘an evening society for conversation’: ‘There is nothing served about there, neither tea, nor coffee, nor lemonade, nor anything whatever, and depend upon it, Sir, a man does not love to go to a place from whence he comes out exactly as he went in.’ Boswell’s Life 4. 90.
He urged Mrs. Thrale to provide her guests with ‘a profusion of the best sweetmeats.’
[185] How true this is to the spirit of conversation is shown by a somewhat scandalous discussion of Miss Hannah More which passed between Mrs. Cholmondeley and Miss Burney: Mrs. Cholmondeley: ‘I don’t like her at all; that is, I detest her! She does nothing but flatter and fawn; and then she thinks ill of nobody. Don’t you hate a person who thinks ill of nobody?’ Diary of Mme. D’Arblay 1. 188.
[186] 1787. Act 3, scene 2.
[187] See her first conversation with Marlow, Act II. She herself calls it sentimental, in reference to these platitudes.
[188] Mélanges 3. 243.
[189] Ib. 266.
[190] Correspondence of Mrs. Delany 4. 236; 30 August 1769.
[191] Diary of Mme. D’Arblay 2. 351.
[192] The tails of macaronis’ wigs were notoriously long.
[193] Spence’s Anecdotes 378.
[194] Boswell’s Life 4. 195. A specimen of what this sort of thing may be is seen in this epigram of Marmontel’s, upon picking up a lady’s pen:
[195] ‘Institutress’ is Mrs. Miller’s unpretending designation of herself. The quotation is from the preface to a volume entitled, Poetical Amusements at a Villa near Bath, Bath 1775.
[196] Walpole’s Letters 9. 134; 15 January 1775.
[197] See the preface to the volume for 1777.
[198] 1776; 1777; 1781.
[199] In 1781; a fifth volume had been announced for 1782.
[200] London 1777.
[201] Bath 1776.
[202] Bath 1776.
[203] She calls herself a bluestocking in 1780. Diary 1. 403.
[204] Memoirs of Dr. Burney 2. 262.
[205] See below, p. 140.
[206] See above, p. 105.
[207] Cf. the whole passage. Home’s Lady Louisa Stuart, pp. 159-60.
[208] An Italian equivalent for bluestocking is unknown to Tomaseo and Bellini. In a pamphlet, entitled Pursuits of Literature, printed in 1797, T. J. Mathias gives the term calza azzurra as though from Ariosto, quoting,
The first line quoted, however, is not by Ariosto at all, but by Mathias himself. Cf. Orlando Furioso, ed. Papini, canto 46, st. 3.
[209] 1. 379 ff.
[210] Larousse, Grande Encyclopédie.
[211] Mills’s explanation of the word was adopted (without acknowledgment) by Dr. Brewer in his Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, and has therefore had considerable currency. It has been recently repeated, notably in the Quarterly Review for January 1903, in an article entitled ‘The Queen of the Bluestockings,’ by an anonymous writer, and in Mrs. Gaussen’s A Later Pepys.
[212] King Henry IV, Part I, Act 2, scene iv.
[213] Home’s Lady Louisa Stuart, p. 156; cf. the Diary of Madame D’Arblay 4. 65.
[214] The following quotation from Mrs. Montagu’s Letters (4. 117) has been cited (notably in the New English Dictionary and in Hill’s edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson) as showing that the term bluestocking was in use as early as March 8, 1757, on which day Mrs. Montagu writes: ‘I assure you our philosopher (Mr. Stillingfleet) is so much a man of pleasure, he has left off his old friends and his blue stockings, and is at operas and other gay assemblies every night.’ Personally I do not think that this can be regarded as an occurrence of the word bluestocking at all. I incline to think that Mrs. Montagu means no more than she literally says, that Mr. Stillingfleet has left off the homely garb for which he was noted. But, in any case, it is interesting as a reference to the fame of his stockings, and tends to support Boswell’s explanation of the term.
[215] Life 4. 108.
[216] 1. 210 n.; cf. a similar account by Pennington (who remembered the salons) in his Letters of Mrs. Carter to Mrs. Montagu.
[217] Memoirs of Dr. Burney 2. 262-63. No explanation of the term bluestocking is given in the Diary.
[218] Letters of Mrs. Carter to Mrs. Montagu 3. 202; 22 September 1783. The occurrence is referred to by Hannah More in the ‘Advertisement’ prefixed to Bas Bleu (1786). The story was apparently reported to the blues by Lady Dartrey. See Pepys’s letter to Hannah More, in A Later Pepys 2. 235; 13 August 1783.
[219] Gaussen’s A Later Pepys 1. 42.
[220] Those who care to study the playful development of the word may consult the sprightly article, ‘Bas bleu,’ in the earlier edition of Larousse’s Dictionary.
[221] Letters 13. 217; 13 November 1784.
[222] Diary of Madame D’Arblay 5. 50; 27 December 1791.
[223] Much earlier certainly than the date (1790) given in the New English Dictionary, ‘In the evening we had a very strong reinforcement of blues,’ wrote Hannah More in March 1783 (Roberts’ Memoirs of More 1. 275); ‘There was everything delectable in the blue way,’ writes the same author in 1784 in reference to Mrs. Ord’s conversazione (Ib. 1. 317).
[224] Diary of Madame D’Arblay 2. 236; 9 December 1783.
[225] Ib. 4. 66; 1 August 1788.
[226] Cf. Fanny Burney, ‘He had no small reverence for us blue-stockings.’ Diary 1. 403; June 1780.
[227] A Series of Letters 4. 218.
[229] Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Works 2. 179; 30 September 1776.
[230] Lettres à Walpole 3. 243, 256.
[231] Ib. 3. 383.
[232] Forbes’s Life of Beattie 1. 389; 3 September 1775.
[233] Correspondence of Mrs. Delany 5. 165.
[234] Diary of Madame D’Arblay 1. 460.
[235] Letters 2. 149; 1 May 1780.
[236] A Later Pepys 1. 404.
[237] Correspondence of Mrs. Delany 4. 204-205.
[238] Home’s Lady Louisa Stuart, p. 158.
[239] The letter is undated, but, as it refers to the death of Lord Bath, it must be later than 1764. Burke is strangely criticised for ‘an intemperate vivacity of genius’; the common charge is made against Garrick that he is himself only on the stage, ‘and an actor everywhere else.’ Johnson is not mentioned. The palm is given to Lord Chatham among living wits. Lyttelton’s Letters (1780), pp. 122 ff.
[240] Letters 11. 366 and 368; 9 and 14 January 1781.
[241] Roberts, Memoirs of More 1. 298.
[242] Carter, Series of Letters 4. 141.
[243] Letters on Several Subjects 2. 166.
[244] Letters 14. 5.
[245] Diary 1. 253.
[246] She was so called by Mrs. Delany as early as 1751. (Correspondence 3. 21), who adds, ‘The spirits of the air protect her.’
[247] Letters to Mrs. Montagu 1. 242.
[248] Ib. 1. 330.
[249] Ib. 1. 311.
[250] Mrs. Carter writes her (Series of Letters 4. 27), ‘I prevented you from carrying me to every place you had ever heard of in England or Wales.’
[251] Letters to Mrs. Montagu 1. 335, 2. 355; cf. 2. 109.
[252] Series of Letters 4. 120.
[253] Ib. 4. 137.
[254] Correspondence of Mrs. Delany 3. 40.
[255] Ib. 5. 523.
[256] Hannah More writes: ‘Tuesday I was at Mrs. Vesey’s assembly which was too full to be very pleasant. She dearly loves company; and as she is connected with almost everything that is great in the good sense of the word, she is always sure to have too much.’ Roberts’s Memoirs 1. 278; 29 March 1783.
[257] Diary of Madame D’Arblay 2. 214; 19 June 1783.
[258] Letters 11. 170.
[259] ‘Madam, I have read his book, and I have nothing to say to him.’ Series of Letters 3. 228 note; Johnsonian Miscellanies 2. 12 note.
[260] Series of Letters 3. 255; 21 May 1765.
[261] ‘She seemed rather desirous to assemble persons of celebrity and talents under her roof or at her table than assumed or pretended to form one of the number herself.’ Wraxall’s Historical Memoirs 1. 103. ‘Without attempting to shine herself she had the happy secret of bringing forward talents of every kind, and of diffusing over the society the gentleness of her own character.’ Forbes’s Life of Beattie 1. 209 n.
[262] Letters of Mrs. Carter to Mrs. Montagu 1. 271 and A Series of Letters 3. 292.
[263] Diary of Madame D’Arblay 2. 234.
[264] Her letters, with the exception of a lively but rather incoherent note to Hannah More, have not been published. Lord Lyttelton wrote to Garrick: ‘You will be charmed (as I am) with the lively colouring and fine touches in the epistolary style of our sylph, joined to the most perfect ease. Mrs. Montagu’s letters are superior to her in nothing but force and compass of thought.’ Garrick, Correspondence 1. 440; 12 October 1771.
[265] Series of Letters 4. 6.
[266] Ib. 4. 83.
[267] Ib. 4. 354.
[268] Letters to Mrs. Montagu 1. 335.
[269] Diary 1. 253-54.
[270] Letters 9. 152; 24 January 1775: ‘The Cophthi were an Egyptian race, of whom nobody knows anything but the learned; and thence I gave Mrs. Montagu’s academies the name of Coptic.’
[271] Johnson, Walpole, Goldsmith, Burke, Reynolds, Boswell, Garrick, Sterne, General Potemkin, General Paoli, General Oglethorpe, half a dozen bishops, and all the blues were at various times among her guests. Of one of her entertainments, Hannah More wrote: ‘She had collected her party from the Baltic to the Po, for there was a Russian nobleman, an Italian virtuoso, and General Paoli.’ Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 212.
[272] Series of Letters 3. 323.
[273] Ib. 3. 255.
[274] Her prosaic sister-in-law, whom friends called ‘Body,’ as they called Vesey ‘Mind.’
[275] Letters to Mrs. Montagu 1. 358.
[276] See Melville’s Life and Letters of Sterne 2. 67 ff.
[277] Life of Mrs. Delany 5. 307. Gibbon wrote of Raynal (Letters 2. 75; 30 September 1783): ‘His conversation which might be very agreeable, is intolerably loud, peremptory, and insolent; and you could imagine that he alone was the Monarch and legislator of the World.’ Walpole, who met him at Baron d’Holbach’s, was so bored by his questions that he pretended to be deaf. ‘After dinner he found I was not, and never forgave me.’ Three years later, however, he dined with Walpole at Strawberry Hill: ‘The Abbé Raynal not only looked at nothing himself, but kept talking to the Ambassador the whole time, and would not let him see anything neither. There never was such an impertinent and tiresome old gossip. He said to one of the Frenchmen, we ought to come abroad to make us love our own country. This was before Mr. Churchill, who replied very properly, “Yes we had some Esquimaux here lately, and they liked nothing because they could get no train-oil for breakfast.”’ Letters 9. 92; 12 November 1774, and 10. 62; 15 June 1777.