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THE TIMES OF CHARLES THE SECOND.
67
MR. MONTAGUE[1] TO MR. SIDNEY.
London, August 11th, — 79.
You are, I presume, so much taken up with politics, that a letter from a man that is out of them, and that is in town when the Court is at
- ↑ Ralph Montague, afterwards created Duke of Montague, by Queen Anne. Swift says of him, that he was " as arrant a knave as any in his time," and certainly there are some well known passages in his life, which, little as Swift is to be trusted in the characters he draws of his contemporaries, prove that he was not far wrong in his estimate of Mr. Montague.
Montague had been Ambassador at Paris, an employment for which, to judge from a note of Lord Dartmouth's in Burnet's History, he was indebted more to the partiality and influence of the fair sex than to his own merits. "Montague told Sir William Temple, he designed to go Ambassador to France. Sir William asked how that could be, for he knew the King did not love him, and the Duke hated him. 'That's true,' said be, 'but they shall do as if they loved me.' Which, Sir William told, he soon brought about, as he supposed by means of the ladies, who were always his best friends for some secret perfections that were hid from the rest of the world." If he owed this appointment to woman's love, he lost it through woman's jealousy. When he was at Paris he had been very intimate with the Duchess of Cleveland, and there are several letters in this collection written by him to Sidney in 1678, in each of which he alludes to her. In May in that year, he writes thus from Paris: "I received yours by John Hill. I am glad to hear my Lady Cleveland looked so well. I do not wonder at it—I will always lay on her side against everybody—I am a little scandalized you have been but once to see her—pray make
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