hen I have found
disputants I less respected, I have sometimes taken pleasure in raising
their hopes by my concessions: they are charmed when I agree with them
in the number of the sacraments; but are horridly disappointed when I
explain myself by saying the word sacrament is not to be found either in
Old or New Testament; and one must be very ignorant not to know it is
taken from the listing oath of the Roman soldiers, and means nothing
more than a solemn, irrevocable engagement. Parents vow, in infant
baptism, to educate their children in the Christian religion, which they
take upon themselves by confirmation; the Lord's Supper is frequently
renewing the same oath. Ordination and matrimony are solemn vows of a
different kind: confession includes a vow of revealing all we know, and
reforming what is amiss: extreme unction, the last vow, that we have
lived in the faith we were baptised: in this sense they are all
sacraments. As to the mysteries preached since, they were all invented
long after, and some of them repugnant to the primitive institution."

CHAPTER XVI

ON THE CONTINENT (1745-1760)

Lady Mary stays at Avignon--She removes to Brescia--And then to
Lovere--She abandons all idea of Montagu joining her abroad--Her house
at Lovere--Her daily round--Her health--Her anxiety about her son--An
amazing incident--A serious illness--A novel in a letter--Her
correspondence attracts the attention of the Italian authorities--Sir
James and Lady Frances Steuart--Politics--She is in the bad books of the
British Resident at Venice--Lord Bute--The philosophy of Lady
Mary--Letters to Lady Bute and Sir James Steuart.

Lady Mary liked Avignon so well that she stayed there until July 1746.
Then she moved to Brescia, where she stayed for a year, and then took up
her quarters at Lovere, a small place in Lombardy on the Lake d'Iseo, a
most attractive spot, as she was at pains to tell her daughter at some
length. For some time she alternated between Lovere and Brescia.

"I am now in a place the most beautifully romantic I ever saw in my
life: it is the Tunbridge of this part of the world, to which I was sent
by the doctor's order, my ague often returning, notwithstanding the
loads of bark I have taken" (she wrote to her daughter from Lovere, July
24, 1747). "To say truth, I have no reason to repent my journey, though
I was very unwilling to undertake it, it being forty miles, half by land
and half by water; the land so st