United States or Belarus ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
At noon home to dinner, where Mr. Jackson go to find my cozen Roger Pepys, which I did in the Parliament House, where I met him and Sir Thomas Crew and Mr. George Montagu, who are mighty busy how to save my Lord's name from being in the Report for anything which the Committee is commanded to report to the House of the miscarriages of the late war.
Montagu took no sort of notice of his threatening gesture, for he was looking to see if Wildney was hurt, and finding he was not, proceeded to drag him out, struggling and kicking frantically. "Drop me, you fellow, drop me, I say. I won't go for you," cried Wildney, shaking with passion. "Eric, why do you let him bully me?" "You let him go this minute," repeated Eric, hoarsely.
"Yet this same Montagu," observed one of the ringleaders, "when Hilyard was well-nigh at the gates of York, sallied out and defeated him, sans ruth, sans ceremony." "Yes, but he spared my life, and beheaded the dead body of poor Hugh Withers in my stead: for John Nevile is cunning, and he picks his nuts from the brennen without lesing his own paw.
The little monsters appear in cocked hats and gilt paper, with their faces painted, and with dancing and music, and a very pretty girl pirouetting in a hogshead of cut paper, with large boys about her, like trees dancing. Of course, we are constantly reminded of Edward Wortley Montagu, and of his delightful experience with the chimney-sweeps. John Randolph.
"I expect a letter next post to tell me you are well in London and that your business will not detain you long from her that cannot be happy without you." Even in these early days of marriage Montagu seemed to have no love for domestic life, and often he stayed in London when he could have been in the country with his wife, or had her with him in town.
To mention the subject to Owen or Montagu, who were best capable of advising him, would have been to renew the memory of unpleasant incidents, which he was most anxious to obliterate from the memory of all. He had not the moral courage to face the natural consequences of his past misconduct, and was now ashamed to speak of what he had not then been ashamed to do.
Among other discourse concerning long life, Sir J. Minnes saying that his great-grandfather was alive in Edward the Vth's time; my Lord Sandwich did tell us how few there have been of his family since King Harry the VIIIth; that is to say, the then Chiefe Justice, and his son the Lord Montagu, who was father to Sir Sidney, who was his father.
There has always been a strong strain of extravagance in the governing families of England; from time to time they throw off some peculiarly ill-balanced member, who performs a strange meteoric course. A century earlier, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was an illustrious example of this tendency: that splendid comet, after filling half the heavens, vanished suddenly into desolation and darkness.
Montagu Webster was a man who, at many a subscription ball, had shaken a gifted dancing-pump, and nothing in the proper circumstances pleased him better than to exercise the skill which had become his as the result of twelve private lessons at half-a-crown a visit; but he recognised the truth of the scriptural adage that there is a time for dancing, and that this was not it.
If so, all the more credit to him as an artificer. And another feather in his cap is that, although you can hardly ever mistake the writer, his letters take a slight but sufficient colour of difference according to the personality of the recipient. He does not write to Montagu exactly as he writes to Mann; to Gray as to Mason; to Lady Upper-Ossory as to earlier she-correspondents.
Word Of The Day