ng reading; but she
never had any idea of publication. "I know mankind too well to think
they are capable of receiving the truth, much less of applauding it; or,
were it otherwise, applause to me is as insignificant as garlands on the
dead."

"I am exceedingly glad of your father's good health: he owes it to his
uncommon abstinence and resolution," Lady Mary wrote to her daughter,
April 11, 1759. "I wish I could boast the same. I own I have too much
indulged a sedentary humour and have been a rake in reading. You will
laugh at the expression, but I think the liberal meaning of the ugly
word rake is one that follows his pleasures in contradiction to his
reason. I thought mine so innocent I might pursue them with impunity. I
now find that I was mistaken, and that all excesses are (though not
equally) blamable. My spirits in company are false fire: I have a damp
within; from marshy grounds frequently arises an appearance of light. I
grow splenetic, and consequently ought to stop my pen, for fear of
conveying the infection."

"My health is very precarious; may yours long continue and see the
prosperity of your family. I bless God I have lived to see you so well
established, and am ready to sing my _Nunc dimittis_ with pleasure,"
Lady Mary wrote to her daughter in November, 1760; and early in the next
year she touched on the same subject in a letter to Sir James Steuart.
"I have not returned my thanks for your obliging letter so soon as both
duty and inclination prompted me but I have had so severe a cold,
accompanied with a weakness in my eyes, that I have been confined to my
stove for many days.... I am preparing for my last and longest journey,
and stand on the threshold of this dirty world, my several infirmities
like posthorses ready to hurry me away."

It was in January, 1761, that Edward Wortley Montagu passed away at the
age of eighty-three. He died at Wharncliffe, the family seat of the
Wortleys, where he had lived in a most miserly manner. He had only one
luxury--tokay, of which he was passionately fond. He left a great
fortune, the highest estimate of which was L1,350,000. Horace Walpole
said the estate was worth L600,000. Walpole gives some particulars of
the legacies: "To his son, on whom six hundred a-year was settled, the
reversion of which he has sold, he gives L1,000 a-year for life, but not
to descend to any children he may have by any of his many wives. To Lady
Mary, in lieu of dower, but which to b