to have pursued them by
any direct severity pointed at them."

Lady Mary Wortley Montague is a remarkable instance of an author nearly
lost to the nation; she is only known to posterity by a chance
publication; for such were her famous Turkish letters, the manuscript of
which her family once purchased with an intention to suppress, but they
were frustrated by a transcript. The more recent letters were
reluctantly extracted out of the family trunks, and surrendered in
exchange for certain family documents, which had fallen into the hands
of a bookseller. Had it depended on her relatives, the name of Lady Mary
had only reached us in the satires of Pope. The greater part of her
epistolary correspondence was destroyed by her mother; and what that
good and Gothic lady spared, was suppressed by the hereditary austerity
of rank, of which her family was too susceptible. The entire
correspondence of this admirable writer and studious woman (for once, in
perusing some unpublished letters of Lady Mary's, I discovered that "she
had been in the habit of reading seven hours a day for many years")
would undoubtedly have exhibited a fine statue, instead of the torso we
now possess; and we might have lived with her ladyship, as we do with
Madame de Sevigne. This I have mentioned elsewhere; but I have since
discovered that a considerable correspondence of Lady Mary's, for more
than twenty years, with the widow of Colonel Forrester, who had retired
to Rome, has been stifled in the birth. These letters, with other MSS.
of Lady Mary's, were given by Mrs. Forrester to Philip Thicknesse, with
a discretionary power to publish. They were held as a great acquisition
by Thicknesse, and his bookseller; but when they had printed off the
first thousand sheets, there were parts which they considered might give
pain to some of the family. Thicknesse says, "Lady Mary had in many
places been uncommonly severe upon her husband, for all her letters were
loaded with a scrap or two of poetry at him."[289] A negotiation took
place with an agent of Lord Bute's; after some time Miss Forrester put
in her claims for the MSS.; and the whole terminated, as Thicknesse
tells us, in her obtaining a pension, and Lord Bute all the MSS.

The late Duke of Bridgewater, I am informed, burnt many of the numerous
family papers, and bricked up a quantity, which, when opened after his
death, were found to have perished. It is said he declared that he did
not choose that his a