The Project Gutenberg EBook of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, by Lewis Melville

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Title: Lady Mary Wortley Montague
Her Life and Letters (1689-1762)

Author: Lewis Melville

Release Date: January 4, 2004 [EBook #10590]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU

Her Life and Letters (1689-1762)

By

LEWIS MELVILLE

_WITH A FRONTISPIECE BY AUBREY HAMMOND, AND SIXTEEN OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS_

To
EDITH AND JOHN CABOURN

PREFACE

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu has her niche in the history of medicine as
having introduced inoculation from the Near East into England; but her
principal fame is as a letter-writer.

Of her gifts as a correspondent she was proud, and with reason. It was
in all sincerity that in June, 1726, she wrote to her sister, Lady Mar:
"The last pleasures that fell in my way was Madame Sevigne's letters:
very pretty they are, but I assert, without the least vanity, that mine
will 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 the
year, she said half-humorously to the same correspondent: "I writ to you
some 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, and
worthy any of the Sevigne's or Grignan's, crammed with news." That Lady
Mary's belief in herself was well founded no one has disputed. Even
Horace Walpole, who detested her and made attacks on her whenever
possible, said that "in most of her letters the wit and style are
superior to any letters I have ever read but Madame de Sevigne's." A
very pleasant tribute from one who had a goodly conceit of himself as a
letter-writer.

Walpole, as a correspondent, was perhaps more sarcastic and more witty;
Cowper undoubtedly more tender and more gentle; but Lady Mary had
qualities all her own. She had powers of observation and the gift of
description, which qualities are especially to b