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Montagu towards the close of her life, described her as "a composition of art" and as one "long attached to the trick and show of life." But the most diverting picture of the Queen of the Blue-Stockings was given by Richard Cumberland in a paper of the Observer.
They were still looked upon as blue-stockings and queer; they had often to serve as the butt of ridicule; but they had education, income, a certain degree of leisure, and a social recognition which, if grudging in some quarters, was all the more generous in others.
What has this got to do with his poetry? It has everything to do with it. It gives him the key to the hearts of children; to the basic savagery of a primitive black or a poor white; to peripatetic harvesters; to futurists, imagists, blue-stockings, pedants of all kinds; to evangelists, college professors, drunken sailors, tramps whose robes are lined with vermin.
Through what he was saying, she could hear Tony "your white velvet dress do you remember...?" She got up to dance. The room seemed to whirl round her while she stood quite still. "Of course, we know all about Boston, Mrs. Everill," her partner was saying, "it produces beans and Cabots and blue-stockings and brides," he added, smiling. Tony and Vivian were still sitting on their sofa.
In vain papa pished and pshawed, and mamma grieved, and begged John not to spoil the girls by making bookworms of them; in vain "Laura C. and the rest of them" entreated us to join this picnic or show ourselves at that party; in vain the young men professed themselves afraid of us, and the girls tossed their heads and called us blue-stockings.
Accordingly we find him launching away in a career of social dissipation; dining and supping out; at clubs, at routs, at theaters; he is a guest with Johnson at the Thrales, and an object of Mrs. Thrale's lively sallies; he is a lion at Mrs. Vesey's and Mrs. Montagu's, where some of the high-bred blue-stockings pronounce him a "wild genius," and others, peradventure, a "wild Irishman."
They will not descend to the silly conversation which is more pleasing than it ought to be from the pretty girls of their set, and they know it would be out of place to talk of anything which really interests them. They do not want to be called blue-stockings even by young men they despise. But the agonies such girls suffer in society are unnecessary.
And this is only the beginning, since it is generally felt that women are better educated than men, outside of the great professions. And why not, since they have more leisure for literary pursuits than men? Who now sneers at the intellect of a woman? Who laughs at blue-stockings? Who denies the insight, the superior tact, the genius of woman?
She even showed to them to the parson's wife, who protested they were charming, and the parson's three daughters insisted on each having a copy of them. All this was exceedingly balsamic, and I was still more consoled and encouraged, when the young ladies, who were the blue-stockings of the neighborhood, and had read Dr.
There were little manuals in questions and answers, pamphlets of aggressive tone after the manner of Monsieur de Maistre, and certain novels in rose-coloured bindings and with a honied style, manufactured by troubadour seminarists or penitent blue-stockings.
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