So would I draw (but oh! 'tis vain to try,
My narrow genius does the power deny),
The equal lustre of the heavenly mind,
Where every grace with every virtue's joined,
Learning not vain, and wisdom not severe,
With greatness easy, and with wit sincere,
With just description show the soul divine,
And the whole princess in my work should shine.
The verses are insipid enough, like most compliments; but they express an opinion which circumstances very shortly afterward compelled him to change, when the princess became transformed into a modern "Sappho" and, thrown with Lord Fanny, Sporus, Atossa, and many others, into a group, was "damned" by satire to "everlasting fame."
Lady Montague's life, many years after her return from the East, was spent like that of most other ladies of fashion, who mingle a taste for literature and politics with gallantry. Her letters to her sister, who now, through the attainder and exile of her husband, Erskine Earl of Mar, resided abroad, abound with evidences that the pleasures which she had heretofore regarded as the summum bonum soon palled the appetite; and that as the effervescence of animal spirits which, during her youth, had given a keen relish to life subsided, a metamorphosis, the reverse of that of the butterfly, took place, changing the gay fluttering summer insect into a grub. A cynical contempt of all things human succeeded. Into the grounds of her separation from her husband I shall not inquire. Ill health was at the time the cause assigned. The triumph of the political party to which she was opposed has since been absurdly put forward to account for it: but she had, no doubt, other reasons, much more powerful, for cutting herself off, during a period of twenty-two years, from all personal intercourse with her family.
Be this however as it may, in the month of July, 1739, she departed from England, and bade an eternal adieu to Mr. Montague and the greater number
