No More Learning

Cheap quarto ‘histories'-Reynard the Fox, Tom a Lincoln, or
the Red Rose Knight, The Life and Death of Mother Shipton,
Scogin': Jests, with many others of that genus—had a ready sale
at sixpence or a shilling; while the smaller chapbooks—the
* Penny Merriments' and 'Penny Godlinesses' which Pepys, with
an eye ever alert for the broad humours of the populace, found
amusement in collecting—were printed vilely and sold in
thousands. These latter consisted of old popular favourites, such
as The Friar and the Boy, The King and the Cobbler, Jack of
Newbery, with Cupid 8 Court of Salutations, garlands of songs,


## p. 335 (#357) ############################################

XIV]
Rubric Posts
Book Auctions
335
6
books of riddles, cookery recipes, dream interpreters and
fortune tellers. While the Licensing act was still in force, many
of these trifles were solemnly submitted to the censor, who, ap-
parently, did not consider it part of his office to refine the coarse
crudities which appealed to the taste and wit of the democracy,
since they bear his imprimatur on their title-pages. Besides being
exposed for sale in the smaller shops, they were hawked about
the streets by 'flying stationers,' or 'running booksellers,' and
carried further afield by country chapmen or hawkers, who got
their supplies from the shop of William Thackeray, at the Angel
in Duck lane, or John Back, at the Black Boy on London bridge,
or from one of the several other stationers who specialised in this
literature and sometimes combined with it the sale of pills or of
‘Daffy's Elixir Salutis ’ at half-a-crown the half-pint bottle.
The business of a retail bookseller was carried on mainly by
direct transactions in his shop. In the eighteenth century, the
rubric posts, referred to by Ben Jonson in his oft-quoted lines 'To
my Bookseller,' were still in use as a means of advertising new
publications, and Pope makes mention of them as a conspicuous
feature of bookshops in his day. Upon these posts were stuck up
the title-pages of works to which the bookseller desired to call
attention. Lintot made extensive use of them, and it was near the
end of the century before they disappeared, John Sewell in Corn-
hill, according to Nichols-, being, perhaps, the last who exhibited
the leading authors in this way. It seems that, about the middle
of the century, the custom of displaying new books upon the
counter was an innovation recently adopted from Oxford and
Cambridge booksellers? . For the extension of his business, a
pushing tradesman would also be active in the circulation of
‘proposals' (prospectuses) for subscriptions to forthcoming books ;
and there were yet other devices at the command of an enter-
prising man, such as that adopted by Payne, who, in 1768, sent out
copies of Richard Gough's Anecdotes of British Topography, to
such as were likely to buy them, with the result, as Gough records,
that, when William Brown, the other bookseller, had sold but five,
Payne had disposed of forty or fifty.
The sale of books by way of auction, or who will give most for
them' had already been in practice on the continent for three
quarters of a century when William Cooper, a bookseller who
carried on business at the Pelican in Little Britain, introduced it
1 Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, vol. II, p. 405.
9 Ibid. vol. iv, p. 440.
6


## p. 336 (#358) ############################################

336
[
Book Production and Distribution [ch.
into England. The first sale was that of the library of the late
Lazarus Seaman ; it began on 31 October 1676, and occupied
eight days. The success of this experiment soon caused the inno-
vation to become popular, and, before the end of the century,
considerably over one hundred auctions had taken place. The
majority of these sales were held by Cooper and Edward Millington,
the latter a born auctioneer, whose quick wit and wonderful fluency
of speech contributed in no small degree to his success in this rôle.
He may have professed that his object was to afford 'diversion
and entertainment' without any sinister regard to profit or ad-
vantage ; but, by his ready fund of professional patter, he could
often enhance the values of his wares, and sell 'em by his Art for
twice their worth". '
Booksellers were not long in perceiving that this method of
disposing of private libraries might, with similar advantage, be
applied to relieving their own shelves of overweighted stock,
and quite a number of sales consisted of books from this source.
Prominent among the many who conducted book auctions in the
eighteenth century are Christopher Bateman, the Ballards, Lockyer
Davis and his son-in-law, John Egerton. Samuel Paterson, too,
who gave up bookselling for auctioneering, was, in his day, a noted
cataloguer, with a wide and curious knowledge of the contents of
books ; but he had an invincible weakness for dipping into any
volume that might excite his curiosity during cataloguing, so it
not infrequently happened that catalogues were ready only a few
hours before the time of the sale. The domus auctionaria which
Samuel Baker set up in York street, Covent garden, in 1744, was
the earliest establishment devoted entirely to book auctions. On
Baker's death, in 1788, his partner George Leigh, of the famous
crumple-horn-shaped snuff-box, associated with himself Samuel
Sotheby, and thus brought into the firm a name which has survived
to the present day.
The chief rules under which sales were conducted were much
akin to those still customary; but the sums by which bids advanced
were curiously small, a penny being a common bid. Tricks of the
trade developed on both sides with the progress of the business.
Cases of an auctioneer raising the prices by phantom bids were
not unknown; and already, in 1721, we find suggestion of the
fraudulent “knock-out' in practice among booksellers. Concerning
a certain auction in that year, Humfrey Wanley, in his journal
as Harleian librarian, records ‘for the information of posterity. . .
1 Brown, Thomas, Elegy on Mr Edward Millington (in Familiar Letters, 1718).


## p. 337 (#359) ############################################

xiv] Lackington's "Temple of the Muses' 337
'
that the books in general went at low, or rather at vile rates :
through a combination of the booksellers against the sale? '; and
he observes, also, that the current prices of books had much
advanced during late years.
It is possible that the success of the auctionary' method of
disposing of superfluous stock may have suggested the catalogue
of books at marked prices as a means of facilitating communication
between bookseller and buyer and of placing additional temptation
in the way of the latter. At all events, by the middle of the
eighteenth century the practice of issuing such catalogues was
widely in use, and many booksellers sent out their priced cata-
logues annually or even twice a year. Conspicuous among these was
Thomas Osborne, insolent and ignorant, but with enough business
wit to amass a considerable fortune, the Ballards, noted for their
divinity catalogues, the Paynes and James Lackington. Lacking-
ton, whose Memoirs contain a lively account of his remarkable
business career, with a strange variety of other matters, in-
cluding the state of the bookmarket of his day, began life as a
shoemaker, but soon abandoned that calling for the more congenial
occupation of trafficking in books. From his initial experiment
in bookselling, the purchase of a sackful of old theology for a
guinea, le progressed steadily, in spite of lack of education. His
first catalogue, issued in 1779, caused mirth and derision by its
many blunders, but he got rid of twenty pounds' worth of books
within a week. He sold for ready money only, and made a practice
of selling everything cheap with the object of retaining the cus-
tomers he had and of attracting others. The success of these
principles, which he was not above proclaiming in his carriage
motto, ‘Small gains do great things, brought him an enormous
increase of business. His shop, known as “The Temple of the
Muses,' occupied a large corner block in Finsbury square, and has
been described as one of the sights of London”. In the centre
stood a huge circular counter, and a broad staircase led to the
lounging rooms and to a series of galleries where the volumes
arranged on the shelves grew shabbier and cheaper as one ascended.
Every one of these thousands of books was marked with its lowest
price and numbered according to a printed catalogue. In 1792,
,
Lackington estimated his profits for the year to be about £5000; at
that period, he was issuing every year two catalogues, of which he
Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, vol. 1, p. 91 (where is printed a series of interesting
extracts from Wanley's journal).
· Knight, C. , Shadows of the Old Booksellers (1865), pp. 282–3.
B. L. XI. CH. XIV.
22
2


## p. 338 (#360) ############################################

338 Book Production and Distribution
[CH.
printed more than three thousand copies, and he calculated that
he was selling upwards of 100,000 volumes annually.
In his Memoirs, written about 1791, Lackington observes that
the sale of books in general has increased prodigiously within the last twenty
years. According to the best estimation I have been able to make, I suppose
that more than four times the number of books are sold now than were sold
twenty years since.
He also remarked that the recent general introduction of histories,
romances, stories and poems into schools had been a great means
of diffusing a taste for reading among all ranks of people. The
extensive increase in the habit of reading naturally brought with
it the need of an ampler supply of literature, and, though books
had become cheaper and more plentiful, it is hardly to be supposed
that the demands of the large body of general readers could be
satisfied by the limited number of books they were able to buy or
borrow, and the medium of circulating libraries was an obvious
method of augmenting supplies.
The earliest recorded date of the establishment of a circulating
library in London seems to be 1740; but, for some fifteen years
before this, Allan Ramsay, the poet bookseller, had been lending
out to the citizens of Edinburgh English novels and romances at a
penny a night, possibly to the scandal of the unco guid, but
thereby letting a breath of wider air into the particularism of the
Scottish literary taste of the time. The movement soon spread,
both in the metropolis and in the provinces : in 1751, the enter-
prising William Hutton of Birmingham added a library to his
bookshop; and, in the same decade, a subscription library was
established in Liverpool. John Nicholson, familiarly known as
Maps, had his library in Cambridge ; and, by the end of the
century, others were to be found in most towns of any importance.
The numerous private bookclubs which existed in every part of
the country also formed a considerable channel for the distribution
of books. In these clubs, members contributed a certain sum
periodically for the purchase of books, which were circulated in ro-
tation among subscribers, much in the same fashion that still obtains.
The chief lists of current English books in the middle of the
seventeenth century are the catalogues issued by John Rothwell
and William London. It was in 1657 that the latter, a Newcastle
bookseller, brought out his Catalogue of the most vendible Books
in England, prefaced by an ‘Introduction to the use of books'
from his own pen. It is significant of the prevailing taste of the
time that more than two-thirds of the books in this list come under
6


## p. 339 (#361) ############################################

XIV] Catalogues
Trade Sales
339
the heading divinity. Various other catalogues appeared ; but
there was no organised attempt to publish a regular list of new
books until 1668, in which year John Starkey, a Fleet street book-
seller, issued, under the title Mercurius Librarius, the first
number of what are known as Term catalogues? Starkey was
soon joined by Robert Clavell, of the Peacock, in St Paul's church-
yard, and, from 1670 to 1709, the list was issued quarterly under
the title A Catalogue of Books continued, printed and published
at London. Clavell also brought out, in 1672, A catalogue of all
the Books printed in England since the Dreadful Fire, a fourth
edition of which, continued to date, appeared in 1696 ; and
publications relating to the popish plot were so numerous that he
thought it worth while to issue, in 1680, a special catalogue of them.
In 1714, Bernard Lintot essayed to take up the work of recording
new books; but his Monthly Catalogue came to an end after eight
numbers, and, again, there was a lapse, until John Wilford, in
1723, began another Monthly Catalogue, which ran for six years.
From about this point, the gap is partially filled by lists of new
books in the monthlies, such as The Gentleman's Magazine, The
London Magazine, The Monthly Review and The Critical Review.
Advertisements of new books, especially those issued by subscrip-
tion, are also to be found in newspapers, and critical notices of
books begin to appear in reviews. In 1766, there was published,
for the use of booksellers, A complete catalogue of modern books,
published from the beginning of this century to the present
time, and this was followed by several similar compilations, the
most active in this field being William Bent of Paternoster row,
who continued his work into the nineteenth century,
A considerable proportion of the business of distributing books
from the publisher to the retail bookseller was effected through the
medium of sales, and trade sales were as much an institution of the
eighteenth century as were trade books. These sales, to which only
booksellers were admitted, and often only such as were invited by
having a catalogue sent to them, consisted either of new books,
which were offered to the trade' on special terms before publica-
tion, or of the stock of a bookseller retiring from business, or, again,
of the remaining stock of certain books which had not 'gone off' to
the publisher's expectations. It was customary for purchasers of
these ‘remainders' to destroy a large proportion of them and charge
6
1 Reprinted by Arber, E. , 3 vols. , 1903—6. For an account and bibliography of
these and other catalogues, see Growoll, A. , Three centuries of English booktrade
bibliography, New York, 1903.
22-2


## p. 340 (#362) ############################################

340 Book Production and Distribution
[ch.
full price for the rest; and there was an understanding that, if
anyone was known to sell such books under publication price, he
should be excluded from future sales. James Lackington, the cheap
bookseller, who always took a strong line of his own, after a time
broke through this custom, and sold off his purchases at a half or
even a quarter of the regular price.
In the provinces, the expansion of the booktrade after the
restoration was not less marked than in the metropolis, though the
volume of business still remained insignificant compared with that
of London. From early times, stationers had been established in
certain important centres, but, between 1640 and 1647, there were
bookshops in about forty different towns, and, in 1704, John Dunton
speaks of three hundred booksellers now trading in country towns.
Some of these enlarged their sphere of operations by itinerant
visits to neighbouring places ; in this way, the needs of Uttoxeter
and Ashby-de-la-Zouch were supplied by the Lichfield bookseller,
Michael Johnson-father of Samuel Johnson—who, also, on market
days, made the journey to Birmingham and opened a shop there.
In the middle of the eighteenth century, William Hutton, the
historian of Birmingham, made similar visits from Birmingham to
Bromsgrove market. In 1692, Nevill Simmons, bookseller, of Shef-
field, held the first book-auction in Leeds, on which occasion, as
related by Ralph Thoresby, who was a buyer at the sale, the room
was so overcrowded that the floor gave way. A few years previous
to this, the enterprising Edward Millington had introduced to the
bookbuyers of Cambridge and other towns this attractive method
of selling books; and Dunton, in 1698, startled Dublin booksellers
by taking across a large quantity of books and selling them by
auction there. Other supplies were carried into the country by
certain London booksellers, who attended regularly the chief
provincial fairs, such as Sturbridge and Bristol, which were still
important centres of book-distribution; and a considerable num-
ber of books found their way direct from London to country
customers, many of the clergy and other buyers of better-class
literature having a bookseller in town from whom they ordered
such books as they wanted. It might very well be expected that
books to be found on the shelves of provincial shops would be
chiefly of a popular nature, and this Lackington discovered to be
the case when, towards the end of the eighteenth century, he made
his progress through the principal towns in the north. He was
struck by the scarcity of books of the better class in the shops he


## p. 341 (#363) ############################################

xiv]
The Provinces Scotland
341
visited: in York and Leeds, it is true, there were a few good books
to be seen, but in all the other towns between London and Edin-
burgh, he declares that nothing but trash was to be found.
Owing to legislative restrictions which permitted no presses to
be set up outside London, except at Oxford, Cambridge and
York, hardly any printing was done in other parts of the country
before the end of the seventeenth century. By 1724, however,
presses had been started in nearly thirty other places ; but Oxford
and Cambridge continued to be the chief provincial centres of book
production.
At Oxford, the university press, which, in 1669, was installed
in the new Sheldonian theatre, made great progress under the
vigorous direction of John Fell, and the excellent work which it did
during this period is seen in books like Wood's Historia (1674),
and Hudson's Dionysius (1704). Clarendon's gift of the copyright
of his History of the Rebellion provided for it, in 1713, a new
habitation and the title Clarendon press. At Cambridge, it was
owing to the zeal of Richard Bentley that, at the end of the
seventeenth century, the university press there experienced a
corresponding revival and the real foundations of the modern
institution were laid.
With the exception of John Baskerville's work at Birmingham,
the book printing done in other provincial towns in the eighteenth
century is not of much account. At York, Thomas Gent combined
topographical authorship with the art of printing, but excelled in
neither; and, in the same city, John Hinxman, in 1760, published
the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy. The booksellers of
Newcastle were numerous enough to have a Stationers' company of
their own about the same date. At Bristol, there was William
Pine, the printer, also Joseph Cottle, the bookseller who published
poems by Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth; while Eton's
bookseller, Joseph Pote, was well known for half a century. Of
private presses, the most noteworthy was that which Horace
Walpole maintained at Strawberry hill from 1757 to 17891.
Unsatisfactory workmen were not his only trouble, for, in a letter
of 1764, to Sir David Dalrymple, he complained that
the London booksellers play me all manner of tricks. If I do not allow them
ridiculous profit they will do nothing to promote the sale; and when I do,
they buy up the impression, and sell it at an advanced price before my face.
North of the border, some respectable printing by Robert Urie
in Glasgow was followed by the establishment of the classic press
1 See, also, ante, vol. x, p. 245.
a


## p. 342 (#364) ############################################

342 Book Production and Distribution [CH. XIV
.
of the brothers Robert and Andrew Foulis; and it was John Wilson
of Kilmarnock who printed the first edition of Burns's poems in
1786. But Edinburgh was the headquarters of the Scottish book-
trade, and the business of printing books for the English market,
which afterwards became a great industry, had already begun, though
the earlier manifestation of its development—the printing of the
cheap books imported into England by Alexander Donaldson and
John Bell—did not meet with appreciation from the London trade.
In the earlier part of the eighteenth century, the admirable printing
done by James Watson and the scholarly press of Thomas Ruddi-
man foreshadowed the excellence that was to become characteristic
of Edinburgh printing ; and, when James Beattie was making
arrangements for the issue of a subscription edition of his essays
in 1776, he was advised to have it printed in Edinburgh, as it
would be more elegantly and correctly done than in London. ' In
the latter half of the century, William Creech was the leading
figure in the Edinburgh trade, and his principal contemporaries
were John Balfour, John Bell and Charles Elliot. Archibald
Constable entered on his initial venture in publishing just four
years before James Ballantyne, of Kelso, made, in 1799, his first
experiment in book-printing, which led to the establishment of the
famous Ballantyne press.
The dominant names in the Dublin trade during the eighteenth
century were those of George Faulkner and Stephen Powell. But,
Irish booksellers displayed their activity chiefly in reprinting all
the best new English books, both for home use and for export.
Since Ireland was outside the scope of the Copyright act, and
produced nothing to tempt reprisals, this practice could be pursued
with impunity, and the story of eighteenth century literature
abounds in complaints against the misdeeds of these pirates.


## p. 343 (#365) ############################################

CHAPTER XV
THE BLUESTOCKINGS
?
DURING the first half of the eighteenth century, Englishwomen
had little education and still less intellectual status.
sidered ‘unbecoming' for them to know Greek or Latin, almost
immodest for them to be authors, and certainly indiscreet to own
the fact. Mrs Barbauld was merely the echo of popular sentiment
when she protested that women did not want colleges. "The best
way for a woman to acquire knowledge,' she wrote, “is from con-
versation with a father, or brother, or friend. It was not till the
beginning of the next century-after the pioneer work of the
bluestockings, be it observed—that Sydney Smith, aided, doubt-
less, by his extraordinary sense of humour, discovered the absurdity
of the fact that a woman of forty should be more ignorant than
a boy of twelve.
In society, at routs or assemblies, cards or dancing were the
main diversions. Women were approached with flattering respect,
with exaggerated compliment, but they were never accorded the
greater compliment of being credited with sufficient intelligence
to appreciate the subjects that interested men. What dean
Swift wrote in 1734 to Mrs Delany from Ireland applied equally
well to general opinion in England : “A pernicious error prevails
here among the men that it is the duty of your sex to be fools in
every article except what is merely domestic. '
There were then, as there always had been, exceptions. There
were women who, by some unusual fortune of circumstance, or
by their own persistent efforts, had secured a share of the educa-
tion that was given to their brothers as a matter of course. One
such woman, Elizabeth Carter, a learned linguist and prominent
bluestocking, wrote to Mrs Montagu concerning a social evening :
As if the two sexes had been in a state of war the gentlemen ranged them-
selves on one side of the room where they talked their own talk and left us
a


## p. 344 (#366) ############################################

344
The Bluestockings
[CH.
a
a
poor ladies to twirl our shuttles and amuse each other by conversing as we
could. By what little I could overhear our opposites were discoursing on the
old English Poets, and this did not seem so much beyond a female capacity
but that we might have been indulged with a share in it.
The faint resentment underlying this gentle complaint indicates
how a few women with a natural and cultivated taste for literature
began to regard the limitations imposed by traditional prejudice
on their mental activities. As an unconscious protest against this
intellectual stifling, as well as against the tyranny of cards,' it
began to be
much the fashion for several ladies to have evening assemblies, where the
fair sex might participate in conversation with literary and ingenious men,
animated by a desire to please 1,
The first conversation,' however, had been given in the early
fifties, many years before Boswell wrote this. It was held at the
house of Mrs Vesey, wife of Agmondesham Vesey, a member of
the Irish parliament, and daughter of Sir Thomas Vesey, bishop
of Ossory. She was a witty Irishwoman with a taste for literature,
who determined to unite the literary and the fashionable society
of her acquaintance—worlds that had hitherto been kept apart.
Much perverse ingenuity was wasted by the writers of the first
quarter of the nineteenth century in trying to account for the
term 'bluestocking. ' Abraham Hayward, de Quincey, Mrs Opie, all
sought for an obscure origin in France, in Italy, anywhere, in fact,
save where it lay embedded in the writings of the bluestocking
circle. The point is still disputed, but critical authorities lean to
the Stillingfleet origin, supported by Boswell, and corroborated
by Madame d'Arblay. During the annual migration of the great
world to Bath, Mrs Vesey, meeting Benjamin Stillingfleet, invited
him to one of her 'conversations. ' Stillingfleet, the disinherited
grandson of the bishop of Worcester, was a botanist and a poet,
a philosopher and a failure. He had given up society and was
obliged to decline the invitation on the score of not having
clothes suitable for an evening assembly. The Irishwoman, a
singularly inconsequent person, giving a swift glance at his every-
day attire, which included small-clothes and worsted stockings,
exclaimed gaily: 'Don't mind dress. Come in your blue stockings. '
Stillingfleet obeyed her to the letter; and, when he entered the
brilliant assembly where ladies in ‘night gowns' of brocade and
lutestring were scarcely more splendid in plumage than men in
garments of satin and paduasoy, the shabby recluse claimed
1 Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. Hill, G. B. (1887), vol. iv, p. 108.


## p. 345 (#367) ############################################

Xv]
Elizabeth Vesey
345
permission to join them by whimsically murmuring: 'Don't mind
dress. Come in your blue stockings. '
Stillingfleet was so popular at these conversation parties, that
'blew stockings,' as he was called, was in great request.
'Such was the excellence of his conversation,' wrote Boswell, that it came
to be said, we can do nothing without the blue stockings, and thus, by degrees,
the title was established. '
By one of the ironic subtleties of nomenclature, a term origin-
ally applied to a man was gradually transferred in deepened tint
to the women of these assemblies. It was a name, 'fixed in playful
stigma,' as one of the circle happily phrased it. For, though blue-
stockings were estimable women, individually held in high honour,
the epithet 'blue,' if not a designation of scorn like les femmes
savantes, held at least a grain of goodhumoured malice; possibly,
because few of them were free from what their 'queen,' with frank
selfcriticism, called, the female frailty of displaying more learning
than is necessary or graceful. '
But it is only just to say that Mrs Vesey! , “the first queen' of
the bluestockings, was free from this particular female frailty.
Though she delighted in literary conversation, she had neither
literary ambition, nor desire to pose as a learned woman. She was
ethereal and imaginative, and, said her friends, even in old age,
combined the simplicity of a child with the eager vivacity of
eighteen. Her intimates called her the sylph, and, of the blue-
stocking hostesses, without question, she was the best-beloved.
By nature unconventional, Mrs Vesey was noted for her amusing
horror of the paralysing effect of the conventional circle. Her large
reception rooms in Bolton row-and, later, in Clarges street-
appropriately upholstered in blue, were crowded with guests, who,
by her deft arrangement of chairs and sofas 'naturally broke up
into little groups' that were 'perpetually varying and changing.
There was ‘no ceremony, no cards, and no supper,' and Mrs Vesey,
we are told, had the almost magic art of putting all her company
at their ease without the least appearance of design. And, what
was possibly even more conducive to the success of her assemblies,
‘it was not absolutely necessary to talk sense. '
Vesey, though not a model husband, was an excellent host,
with sufficient interest in literature to help Lord Lyttelton with
his Life of Henry II, and to be delighted when he was elected
a member of Johnson's Literary club. Husbands were not much
in evidence in the bluestocking circle—by a curious coincidence,
1 See, also, ante, vol. x, chap. XI, p. 261.


## p. 346 (#368) ############################################

346
[ch.
The Bluestockings
they were rarely seen in Parisian salons—but Vesey, undoubtedly,
contributed to the success of his wife's literary parties. To the
Veseys belongs the credit of being among the first to welcome
authors and people with an interest in literature to social inter-
course with the great. Even of Johnson, Croker remarks in a
footnote that, 'except by a few visits in his latter years at the
basbleux assemblies of Mrs Montagu, Mrs Vesey, and Mrs Ord,
we do not trace him in anything like fashionable society. In the
bluestocking coteries, however, he was regarded as a literary lion
of the first rank, 'whose roar was deeper in its tone when he meant
to be civil. ' We get a bluestocking picture of the literary autocrat
from Bennet Langton, one of the best talkers among the 'blues,'
who, knowing Boswell's amiable hero-worship, sent him an ac-
count of an evening at Vesey's. Here, surrounded by duchesses,
lords, knights, and ladies, ‘four if not five deep,' Johnson held
converse with Barnard, provost of Eton, while the company
listened with respectful attention. The evenings were probably
pleasanter, however, when there was less monopoly, and the
various groups conversed among themselves. Hannah More,
whose critical judgment was equal to that of any of the blue-
stockings, not only gave precedence to ' Vesey, of verse the judge
and friend in her poem Bas Bleu, but she also wrote 'I know
of no house where there is such good rational society, and a con-
versation so general, so easy and so pleasant. '
For more than thirty years, Mrs Vesey's house was a notable
centre of the most cultivated society in London. After her
husband's death, however, her mind became clouded, and, for a
few years before she died in 1791, she was unable to recognise
her friends, who, nevertheless, visited her with a loyal devotion,
lest at any time she should regain her faculties, and miss their
society.
In 1787, Hannah More wrote:
Mr Walpole seldomer presents himself to my mind as the man of wit, than
as the tender-hearted and humane friend of my dear infirm, broken-spirited
Mrs Vesey.
>
Though Mrs Vesey was indirectly responsible for the title of
the bluestocking coteries, it was Mrs Montagu', who, by her
dominant character, by her husband's wealth and by the almost
unique position she made for herself in London society, was
speedily recognised as what Johnson in a moment of wrath
satirically called her, the Queen of the Blues. ' Elizabeth
6
1 See, also, ante, vol. x, chap. XI, pp. 261 ff.


## p. 347 (#369) ############################################

Xv] 'The Queen of the Blues'
“
347
Robinson was born at York in 1720, one of a family of twelve
children. Much of her childhood was spent in Cambridgeshire,
with her maternal grandmother, the wife of Conyers Middleton,
librarian of Cambridge university. At Cambridge, the pretty pre-
cocious child was looked on as something of an infant prodigy.
Middleton not only allowed her to come to his academic parties,
but he would afterwards, with educational intent, require from
her an account of the learned conversations at which she had
been present.
At the time of her marriage, he somewhat
pompously reminded her: "This University had the honour of
Mr Montagu's education, and claims some share in yours. ' Her
father, an accomplished amateur artist, delighted in cultivating
the gift of swift repartee that she had evidently inherited from
himself. Her mother, from whom, perhaps, she inherited her taste
for literature, was related to Sterne. At home, she disputed and
argued goodnaturedly with her brothers, till their emulation pro-
duced in their sister 'a diligence of application unusual at the
time'-a diligence that resulted in a knowledge of French, Italian
and some Latin, though, influenced by fashion, she was sometimes
ashamed to own to the latter accomplishment.
While staying with her grandmother in Cambridge, she was
taken to call at Wimpole, the seat of the second earl of Oxford.
Here, she made acquaintance with the earl's only daughter, Prior's
Noble lovely little Peggy,' who, in 1734, married the second duke
of Portland. Though Elizabeth Robinson was only thirteen at the
time of this marriage, the young duchess of eighteen found a good
deal of pleasure in the child's witty letters, and, as she grew older,
frequently invited her to Bulstrode. This friendship introduced
her to a cultivated circle, among whom were Lord Lyttelton,
Mrs Delany—then Mrs Pendarves—and many more, who, besides
helping to form her literary tastes, became her lifelong friends
and good bluestockings. She was early “brought out' by her
father, who, proud of his vivacious daughter, took her into society
at Bath and Tunbridge when she was only thirteen. At the age
when girls of today are enjoying their first balls, Elizabeth, satiated
with years of recurring gaieties, wrote concerning Bath : ""How
d'ye do,” is all one hears in the morning, and "What's trumps ? ”
in the afternoon. Scarcely a year later, she writes to her mother,
'there is nothing so much wanted in this country as the art of making
the same people chase new topics without change of persons. And,
through its slightly involved expression, one may detect, even at
that early age, a foreshadowing of her bluestocking parties.
6
-
6


## p. 348 (#370) ############################################

348
[CH.
The Bluestockings
6
This ‘art' she made a point of cultivating after her marriage
in 1742, with the wealthy Edward Montagu, grandson of the first
earl of Sandwich. She was twenty-two, and her husband twenty-
nine years older; but, as her cold practical nature had already
decided that 'gold is the chief ingredient in worldly happiness,'
the discrepancy in their ages was not considered a drawback to
the solid advantages of wealth and position. When, in 1744, their
.
only child died in infancy, she sought happiness in social and
intellectual pleasures with even greater avidity than before.
Mrs Montagu had not long been married before she discovered
that her husband's town house in Dover street was too small for
her magnificent projects of entertaining. Mr Montagu, therefore,
built a fine house in Hill street, into which they were able to move
in 1748. Here, in her famous Chinese room, she began to give a
series of receptions, and, in 1753, she writes to Mrs Boscawen that
her 'Chinese Room was filled by a succession of people from
eleven in the morning till eleven at night. There is not any
precise information as to when she began to give her bluestocking
parties, but it was probably after she became acquainted with
Mrs Vesey. Though Hannah More gives Mrs Vesey preeminence
in her poem Bas Bleu, it is generally conceded that Mrs Montagu
was the undoubted 'queen’of these assemblies. Lady Louisa Stuart,
granddaughter of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and daughter of
the third earl of Bute, gives a detailed and not too flattering
account of Mrs Montagu's 'attempt at an English salon':
“The only blue stocking meetings which I myself ever attended,' she wrote,
were those at Mrs Walsingham's and Mrs Montagu's. To frequent the
latter, however, was to drink at the fountain-head . . . Mrs Montagu eclipsed
them alli'
She then gives a somewhat sarcastic portrait of the hostess, and,
while allowing that she had quick parts, great vivacity, no small
share of wit, and competent learning, she credits her, also, with a
superabundance of vanity, and concludes with the insinuation that
her 'excellent cook is probably the only one of the powers that
could carry on the war single-handed. '
6
6
6
Thus endowed,' she writes, Mrs Montagu was acquainted with almost
all persons of note or distinction. She paid successful court to all authors,
critics, artists, orators, lawyers, and clergy of high reputation. . . she attracted
all tourists and travellers; she made entertainment for all ambassadors, sought
out all remarkable foreigners, especially if men of letters 2?
1 Gleanings from an old Portfolio (Correspondence of Lady Louisa Stuart), ed.
Clark, Mrs Godfrey (privately printed, 1898), vol. I, p. 61.
2 Ibid. p. 62.


## p. 349 (#371) ############################################

Xv]
6
PII
W!
it's
6
Mrs Montagu's Receptions 349
Lady Louisa was not a bluestocking—she had, indeed, 'a horror
of appearing in print lest she should lose caste'—and her evidence,
though seasoned with a dash of malicious humour, is probably
less biassed than that of the bluestockings whose pens were too
often tipped with the honey of mutual admiration. She flings the
fine scorn of a grande dame on the bluestocking habit of opening
the gates of society to those who had not been born within the
sacred ringfence; she ridicules, with the prejudice of her class
and period, the college geniuses with nothing but a book in their
pockets. ' She stigmatises Mrs Montagu's company as a 'hetero-
geneous medley,' which, with all her sparkling wit and manifold
attractions, she was never able to fuse into a harmonious mass.
*As they went in, so they went out, single, isolated'; a result,
partly owing, no doubt, to Mrs Montagu's habit of arranging her
guests in one large, disconcerting half-circle. Madame d'Arblay
also mentions this peculiar formation, at the head of which sat
the lady of the house, and, on her right, the guest of highest
rank, or the person of the moment whom she most delighted to
honour. Lady Louisa, not restrained by bluestocking loyalty,
frankly holds the custom up to ridicule. “Everything at that
house, as if under a spell, was sure to form itself into a circle or
semi-circle. ' And she tells, further, of 'a vast half-moon' of twenty-
five ladies of whom she was one, seated round the fire, and of the
vain efforts of the men, when they solemnly filed in from dinner, to
break through it.
Lady Louisa’s facts are probably as correct as they are amusing;
but, as facts invariably take the colour of the medium through
which they are presented, be it sympathy or antipathy, it is only
just to dilute her sarcasms with some of the admiration and high
regard expressed by the bluestocking coteries. If not an ideal
hostess, Mrs Montagu had many of the qualities that go to the
ruling of a salon. Lord Lyttelton, one of her intimate court of
Platonic admirers, was amazed, he once told her, that those
dangerous things . . . beauty, wit, wisdom, learning and virtue (to
say nothing about wealth)' had not, long before, driven her from
society. Her wit, from childhood to age, was indisputable. Ву
the alchemy of her dexterous mind she could transmute her wide
reading, her swift impressions, her varied experience into what
she aptly called 'the sal volatile of lively discourse. ' Living, as
she did, in the limelight of a critical society, it was inevitable
that her character should be freely discussed. But, though
her complacent vanity might, occasionally, be censured, her
a
IG


## p. 350 (#372) ############################################

350
[CH.
The Bluestockings
6
affectations deplored, her flattery derided, yet we are told that
even those who were most diverted with her foibles would express
a high opinion of her abilities. 'In her conversation she had more
wit than any other person, male or female, whom I have known,'
wrote Beattie. Dr Johnson, whom, said Mrs Thrale, 'she flattered
till he was ready to faint,' paid her back in the same seductive
coin. When she showed him some plates that had belonged to
queen Elizabeth, he assured her that 'their present possessor was
in no tittle inferior to the first. At another time, he said of her,
Sir, that lady exerts more mind in conversation than any person I ever
met with. Sir, she displays such powers of ratiocination, such radiations of
intellectual excellence as are amazing.
And Lord Bath once told Sir Joshua Reynolds that he did not
believe that there ever was a more perfect human being created, or
ever would be created, than Mrs Montagu. ' Even Lord Macartney,
much given to 'elegant pleasantries,' who 'piqued himself upon
carrying compliments beyond the moon,' having flattered Mrs
Montagu to the furthest limit of credulity, would confess to his
intimates : ‘After all, she is the cleverest woman I know. Meet her
where you will, she says the best thing in the company. ' Horace
Walpole might occasionally wing his sly shafts of malicious wit in
her direction, but there are few greater tributes to the interest of
her assemblies and of the bluestocking coteries generally than his,
and Soame Jenyns's and Owen Cambridge's—the old wits as a
younger generation irreverently called them frequent attendance.
Even her enemies allowed that she had a sincere love of
literature. She ‘makes each rising wit her care,' said a con-
temporary poem, and her kindly discriminating help to struggling
authors, and authors who were past struggling, earned for her the
high-sounding title, the 'female Maecenas of Hill Street,' bestowed
on her by Hannah More. When Anna Williams, the blind
poetess, was left with a precarious income, Mrs Montagu gave her
an annual allowance of £10, a kindness greatly appreciated by
Johnson, who, in his' wild benevolence,' had given Mrs Williams,
in company with other derelicts of humanity, a home under the
shelter of his roof. After Edward Montagu's death, when she be-
came sole mistress of his wealth, she gave an annuity of £100
to Mrs Carter; and, when there was a question of a government
pension for Beattie, she assured him with the utmost delicacy
that, should the project fail, she herself would supply the necessary
funds. These are only a few instances out of many; her corre-
spondence is full of allusions to the needy and distressed. Nor
1
1
3
6


## p. 351 (#373) ############################################

xv]
A Patroness of Literature
351
were her gifts all in the sordid coin of commerce. Not only did
she give generously to her literary friends the encouragement and
sympathy that, in dark moments, are of more value than gold, but
she would promote their interests in every way possible, after the
manner of the ladies of the Parisian salons. It was Mrs Montagu's
wide-reaching influence that materially helped to spread the fame
of Beattie's Essay on Truth, as a counterblast to Hume's 'infidel
writings. ' Later, it was she who suggested its reissue by sub-
scription; and, though she was indefatigable in her efforts to
enlist subscribers, she was much disappointed because it only
produced about four hundred guineas profit for the author. She
gave him introductions to Lord Kinnoul and his brother, the arch-
bishop of York, who both made plans for his advancement. In
1772, she writes: 'I was in hopes to have something done among
the Great that might forward my hope for you’; and, when The
Minstrel appeared, not only did she send copies to Lord Lyttelton,
Lord Chatham and others of her personal friends, but she told
Beattie, ‘I wrote immediately to a person who serves many gentle-
men and ladies with new books, to recommend it to all people
of taste. . . . I have recommended it to many of our bishops and
others. '
Having so active an interest in authors and their works, it
was not surprising that she should one day appear as author
herself. In 1760, when Lord Lyttelton published his Dialogues of
the Dead, the last three were advertised as 'composed by a different
hand,' the hand of Mrs Montagu: though, in deference to the
prejudice of her day, she preferred to shield herself behind a veil
of anonymity, which she was not sorry that most of her friends
were able to penetrate. The Dialogues met with much criticism,
favourable and otherwise. Johnson called them a 'nugatory per-
formance,' and Walpole, by nature unable to resist an opportunity
for epigram, wrote of them as the dead dialogues, a prophecy
that time has almost fulfilled. Those by Mrs Montagu were be-
tween Cadmus and Hercules; Mercury and a modern fine lady;
Plutarch, Charon and a modern bookseller. The first is full of
solid good sense—too solid, indeed, for satire—but every phrase is
trite and obvious, without a glimmer of the wit that Mrs Montagu
scattered freely in her talk and letters. Mrs Carter gave it fatal,
.
discerning praise when she assured its author that it has all the
elegance of polite literature. ' The dialogue between Plutarch
and the bookseller is severe on the popular taste of the day, and
suggests that popular taste, like human nature, never changes.
>


## p. 352 (#374) ############################################

352
[CH.
The Bluestockings
6
6
'I unadvisedly bought an edition of your Lives,' the bookseller
says to Plutarch; "a pack of old Greeks and Romans . . . and the
work which repaired the loss I sustained. . . was the Lives of
the Highwaymen. ' The second dialogue, between Mercury and
Mrs Modish, is in Mrs Montagu's happiest vein of light sarcasm.
It is by far the wittiest of the whole collection, and met with un-
qualified success. It is a lively satire on the fashionable woman of
the period, who, when Mercury summons her to pass the Styx,' is
‘engaged, absolutely engaged . . . to the Play on Mondays, balls on
Tuesdays, the Opera on Saturdays, and to card assemblies the rest
of the week. ' She suggests, however, that he should wait till the
end of the season, when she might like to go to the Elysian fields
for a change. 'Have you a Vauxhall and Ranelagh ? ' she asks.
'I think I should not dislike drinking the Lethe waters when you
have a full season. ' Compliments flowed in from the bluestocking
circle who were inclined to preen themselves on their 'queen’s'
literary success; and Mrs Montagu, exhilarated with the heady wine
of public applause, wrote to Mrs Carter, 'I do not know but at last
I may become an author in form. . . . The Dialogues, I mean the
three worst, have had a more favourable reception than I expected. '
It was not, however, till nine years later, that the great literary
effort of her life appeared, an Essay on the Writings and Genius
of Shakespeare, carrying the sub-title 'with some remarks upon
the misrepresentations of Mons. de Voltaire. ' In her letters, one
may trace its germ at an early stage, with here and there evidences
of its gradual growth. In a letter to Lord Bath, in 1761, she
writes a long criticism of Voltaire's Tancred, in which she com-
pares the natural sallies of passion in our Shakspear' with 'the
pompous declamation' of Voltaire in Tancred.
later, Mrs Carter mentions Mrs Montagu's criticism on Macbeth'
and, when Johnson's preface to the 1765 edition of Shakespeare
with all the other prefaces appeared, she writes of Johnson's as
the ablest of them all. Mrs Montagu's Essay was, in great measure,
a protest against the strictures that Voltaire had for years hurled at
Shakespeare, from whom he had freely borrowed. As many English
readers knew, he had taken whole scenes from Macbeth for his
Mahomet; the plot of his Zaïre was only Othello slightly disguised;
but indignation in England deepened to disgust at Voltaire's
introduction to Sémiramis. Miss Talbot, a bluestocking, wrote to
Mrs Carter in 1745, ‘Voltaire has just published with his Semiramis,
the foolishest, idlest, coarsest critique that ever was? '
1 For criticism of Shakespeare in the eighteenth century see vol. v, chaps. XI, XII.
Three years
9


## p. 353 (#375) ############################################

Xv]
Mrs Montagu and Voltaire
353
6
In her introduction, Mrs Montagu says, “I was incited to this
undertaking by great admiration of his genius, and still greater
indignation at the treatment he has received from a French wit. '
The whole gist of the Essay, however, so far as Shakespeare is
concerned, is summed up in the trite conclusion of the introduction,
'Nature and sentiment will pronounce our Shakespear a mighty
genius; judgment and taste will confess that, as a writer, he is far
from faultless. ' Her vindication of Shakespeare, it may at once
be admitted, was what a contemporary called it, “a work of
supererogation’; but the attack on the literary dictator of Europe,
even though, in its daring, it may suggest the proverb concerning
fools and angels, was at least, well-merited. In Paris, particularly,
when, five years later, the Essay was translated into French,
Voltaire's credit as an authority on Shakespeare was felt to be
seriously damaged. He had boasted that his translation of
Julius Caesar was 'the most faithful translation that can be, and
the only faithful one in the French language of any author, ancient
or modern. Such confidence invited attack, and Mrs Montagu fell
on his errors with a pitiless enjoyment that gives life and vigour to
this part of her destructive criticism. She points out that, in this
only faithful translation, Voltaire has utterly misread the meaning
of several words and phrases, and, with a relish sharpened by
indignation, her unsparing pen points out ‘the miserable mistakes
and galimathias of this dictionary work. ' After an attack on
Corneille, with whom Voltaire had compared Shakespeare, to
the disadvantage of the latter, she finally hopes that the many
gross blunders in this work will deter other beaux esprits from
attempting to hurt works of genius by the masked battery of
an unfair translation. '
The essay, though published anonymously, met with a flattering
reception. The Critical Review wrote of the author as 'almost
the only critic who has yet appeared worthy of Shakespeare,' and
most of the other reviews-save The Monthly Review, which
condemned the language of the Essay as affected—were, on the
whole, favourable. From the bluestocking circle, she received reams
of eulogy, and perhaps Johnson was the only dissentient in the
chorus of praise when he remarked to Sir Joshua Reynolds, 'Sir,
it does her honour, but it would do nobody else honour. Modern
criticism agrees with Johnson, and the Essay is condemned as
'well-intentioned,. . . but feeble,' and quite without value in the
enormous bulk of Shakespeare criticism.
* History of Criticism, by Saintsbury, G. , vol. 11, p. 173.
23
a
E. L. XI.
CH. XV.


## p. 354 (#376) ############################################

354
[CH.
The Bluestockings
6
It brought her, however, a considerable measure of contem-
porary fame in England, and her bluestocking adherents were
proud of their 'queen’s' achievement in the world of letters.
‘She is the first woman for literary knowledge in England,' said
Mrs Thrale, while Fanny Burney wrote that the general plaudits
given to the book ‘mounted her. . . to the Parnassian heights of
female British literature. When, in 1776, she visited Paris she
had the satisfaction of finding her Essay well known, and herself
a celebrity. She was a welcome guest at many of the Parisian
salons, she adopted Parisian rouge, criticised French plays and
French acting with severity and, by a singular chance, her visit
coincided with the opening of the French academy on the
occasion when Voltaire's famous abusive Letter to the Academy
was read by d'Alembert. Shakespeare was again denounced in
language so unrestrained that even some of the forty, wrote Mrs
Montagu, shrugged their shoulders' and showed other strong
signs of disapprobation. At its conclusion, Suard said to her, Je
crois, Madame, que vous êtes un peu fâchée de ce que vous venez
d'entendre. Moi, Monsieur ! she replied, with her ever ready
wit, point du tout ! Je ne suis pas amie de Monsieur Voltaire.
Her bluestocking friends rather feared that her Parisian success
would unduly inflate her selfesteem. Mrs Delany wrote to
Mrs Boscawen a witty little sketch of her as Madame de Montagu,
to which Mrs Boscawen replied, “Much I fear that she will never
be Mrs Montagu, an English woman again ! ' However, their fears
were not realised. She came back to England and was soon her
former English self, something of a poseuse perhaps, a good deal
of an egotist, but always possessing such brilliant qualities of mind
and intellect, such a gift for steady friendship, that she remained
as firmly fixed as hitherto on her bluestocking throne, on which
she had still more than twenty years to reign.
6
But, of the members of the bluestocking circle none was more
‘darkly, deeply, beautifully blue' thán Mrs Elizabeth Carter, who,
though unmarried, took brevet rank as matron after the custom
of her day. She was the daughter of Nicholas Carter, perpetual
curate of a chapel at Deal, and one of the six preachers at Canter-
bury. As a first step in her education, she was sent to Canterbury
for a year to learn French in the house of a Huguenot refugee.
On her return home, she took lessons with her brothers in Latin,
Greek and Hebrew, but she acquired knowledge with such difficulty
1 Letters of Horace Walpole (1904), vol. ix, p. 444.


## p. 355 (#377) ############################################

Xv]
Elizabeth
Carter
355
6
that her father advised her to give up attempting the classical
languages. She continued, however, with dogged persistence.
She rose early, and, to keep her attention from flagging at night,
she took snuff, bound wet towels round her head and chewed
green tea and coffee. As a result of this undaunted plodding,
she gained so solid a knowledge of Greek that Johnson spoke
of her later as one of the best Greek scholars he had ever known.
By degrees, she added Italian, German, Portuguese and Arabic to
her languages. She was, at the same time, educating her young
step-brothers, one of whom was sent to Cambridge.
As a linguist, who spoke fluent French, who could write pure,
literary Italian, who, at need, could talk in Latin, who 'delighted'
in German, who knew something of Hebrew, Portuguese and
Arabic and who was among the best Greek scholars of her time,
her views on the study of languages are worth considering, parti-
cularly as they accord with some of the most modern and intelli-
gent methods of teaching in vogue today. She knew practically
nothing of Greek and Latin grammar, and used to speak of them,
says her biographer, 'with some degree of unmerited contempt.