The Kit-cat Club was in session.

They had dined. Marlborough, in mighty peruke, sat well-fed and thinking in his shifty way., Addison, warmed by company, listened in gentlemanly style to the merry Irish humour of Dick Steele. Garth, Congreve, Vanbrugh were present, and many others of the wild, gallant spirits who had banded themselves together into a club for the threefold purpose of eating Christopher Cat's mutton pies, securing the Protestant succession, and maintaining the beauty of the Whig ladies against those of any other party in the world.

The Kit-cat Club

The members took it in turn to propose a toast to some fair Whig. It was the privilege of Evelyn Pierrepont, Earl of Kingston.

" Gentlemen," he said, " there is not a lady on your roll worthy to gaze into the same mirror with her whose toast I give you for the year."

" Name ! Name ! " broke in merrily from around the table.

" Mary Pierrepont," replied Evelyn Pierrepont.

" His daughter ! exclaimed one ; while others laughingly vowed that they could scarce toast a beauty none had seen.

" See her you shall then," declared the gallant father.

She was fetched. The club saw, and the club was conquered. Even that magnificent personage; Congreve, acclaimed her. She was overwhelmed with attentions, part serious, part fun, but all, no doubt, kindly ; for who is not kind to a tender beauty of eight. She passed from the lap of Addison, " the finest gentleman the world has ever seen," to Marlborough, dark with the shadow of his fame, from him to happy, jewel-hearted Steele, from poet to statesman, making the round of the club.

In due form she was proclaimed the toast of the year, her name was engraved on the drinking-glass, and her portrait painted for the club. It may be that to this youthful debut in the world of wits and statesmen is to be ascribed Lady Mary's idea of happiness which was to be the centre of attraction and of admiration to the famous of her day.

Her father, as may be judged from this anecdote, was not an over strict educationalist, and his daughter's talents came out rather in spite of, instead of thanks to, the encouragement she received from her elders. She was excessively fond of reading, and passed her youth among the old dramatists and absorbed more serious matter as well.

Edward Wortley Montagu

It was an age of literary achievement. Her cousin, Fielding, was laying true and well the foundation-stone of the English novel with " Tom Jones." Addison and Steele were gathering stores of delight for posterity in the " Spectator " and " Tatler." She herself plunged into classical studies to an extent quite unusual in her time, and had a cultivated literary taste.

Her courtship by Edward Wortley Montagu was largely epistolary, and remains a fine example of the hot and cold method of meeting a wooer. The correspondence consists very largely of " last " letters. Not a question started in the letters did not give rise to argument. They were both wholeheartedly absorbed in the lover-like, but frequently unwise, pursuit of probing and explaining their hearts and characters to each other.

Wortley was eleven years her senior. An egoist, fastidious, honourable, and prudent. It took him some time to ascertain Mary's feelings towards him. He had recourse to trickery; had to feign indifference ; left her letters unanswered, wrote her that he had to go abroad. When she really did decide upon marriage it is he who appears to have doubted the wisdom of the step. " If," he wrote, " we should once get into a coach, let us not say one word till we come before the parson, lest we should engage in fresh disputes. But why should we meet at all if we are likely to have them ? "

They were married by special licence on August 12, 1712, and the fact that the marriage settlements and the date of the marriage of Mary to another man had been announced made of this runaway match a nine days' wonder.

The early years of their married life were spent in dull retirement in the country. When, however, after two years of seclusion she returned to town, she dazzled the whole Court, and before long all the poets and the wits, with Pope at their head, were hanging sonnets on her lips and inflaming their muse at the sparkle of her eyes. She became, in a word, the fashion. Kneller painted her, and Pope sang her thus :

The playful smiles around the dimpled mouth, That happy air of majesty and truth ; The equal lustre of the heavenly mind, Where ev'ry grace with every virtue joined.

Her wildness and her brilliance made her the talk and the envy of the town. After about eighteen months in town, Montagu was appointed Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, and left with his wife and child for his post.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the brilliantly gifted beauty of the eighteenth century, who was the toast of the Kit-cat Club, the idol of poets and painters, and a reigning queen of society From the painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller

They spent some time visiting Vienna. Adrianople, and Constantinople. It was during these travels that she began the famous Letters, on which her reputation as a writer rests. Her. Eclogues would never have given her a place as a poetess had it not been for her fascinating, it not very likeable, personality, and that great beauty which impressed everyone, though, curiously enough, they practically never described it in detail.

While in the East Lady Mary adopted the garb of the Turkish women. She visited the bazaars and mixed with Turkish society in a way that would be impossible for an Ambassador's wife in these days.