eel, witty, and
agreeable, of a great family, and who had been the admiration of the
town. I could not forbear shewing my surprise at seeing a nun like her.
She made me a thousand obliging compliments, and desired me to come
often. It will be an infinite pleasure to me, (said she, sighing,) to
see you; but I avoid, with the greatest care, seeing any of my former
acquaintance, and whenever they come to our convent, I lock myself in
my cell. I observed tears come into her eyes, which touched me
extremely, and I began to talk to her in that strain of tender pity she
inspired me with; but she would not own to me that she is not perfectly
happy. I have since endeavoured to learn the real cause of her
retirement, without being able to get any other account, but that every
body was surprised at it, and nobody guessed the reason.

"I have been several times to see her; but it gives me too much
melancholy to see so agreeable a young creature buried alive, and I am
not surprised that nuns have so often inspired violent passions; the
pity one naturally feels for them, when they seem worthy of another
destiny, making an easy way for yet more tender sentiments; and I never
in my life had so little charity for the Roman-catholic religion as
since I see the misery it occasions; so many poor unhappy women! and the
gross superstition of the common people, who are, some or other of them,
day and night offering bits of candle to the wooden figures that are set
up almost in every street. The processions I see very often, are a
pageantry as offensive, and apparently contradictory to all common
sense, as the pagodas of China. God knows whether it be the womanly
spirit of contradiction that works in me; but there never before was so
much zeal against popery in the heart of,

"Dear madam, &c."

In November the Montagus interrupted their stay at Vienna to visit some
of the German Courts. They went to Prague, where the attire of the
ladies amused Lady Mary. "I have been visited by some of the most
considerable ladies, whose relations I know at Vienna," she wrote to
Lady Mar. "They are dressed after the fashions there, as people at
Exeter imitate those of London; that is, the imitation is more excessive
than the original; 'tis not easy to describe what extraordinary figures
they make. The person is so much lost between head-dress and petticoat,
they have as much occasion to write upon their backs 'This is a woman,'
for the information of tra