panions; and Steele, ever ready to drink Addison up to the point of companionship, and Vanbrugh, dramatist and architect, who designed Blenheim Castle. For him the wits made a mock epitaph which runs :

Lie heavy on him, earth, for he

Laid many a heavy load on thee.

Dr. Samuel Garth, who wrote poetry of a mediocre sort, but sufficient to give him a place in Johnson's "Lives of the Poets," was also a member and enlivened the company with toasts and wit. He was a better doctor than poet and was court physician to George I. One night going to the club he declared he must soon be gone, having many patients to attend. The bottle circulating freely, he forgot them, until Steele reminded him of the visits he had yet to pay. Garth pulled out his list, which numbered fifteen. Glancing them over he said: "It is no great matter whether I see them to-night or not. Nine of them have such bad constitutions that all the physicians in the world can't save them, and the other six have such good constitutions that all the physicians in the world can't kill them." So he resumed his toasts and his bottle.

The anecdotes of the club and its members are many, but scattered through numerous volumes. No account of the wits of Queen Anne would be complete without some notice of this most celebrated club.

LADY MARY WORTLEY

MONTAGU.

(1690-1762.)

A GENERATION or a little more ago most wellinformed people would easily understand any reference to "Lady Mary," for among the countless Lady Marys that at one time or another adorned English society there was but one who had won distinction both for her genius and beauty. It is doubtful whether she is so well known to-day, and if it is your intention to speak of the great English letter-writer of the eighteenth century it is necessary to give her full nameLady Mary Wortley-Montagu.

Next to Horace Walpole, who did not love her nor she him, Lady Mary is the most eminent letter-writer in the English language, and it is to her we owe those pictures of society in the days of Queen Anne and of the first Georges that show us so plainly what manner of men and women our ancestors were. She paints like an

impressionist and her brush is large and often coarse, but there the picture stands, never to be forgotten. She saw the humorous as well as the serious side of life, with an eye quick to see the grotesqueries and follies of the people about her, and she set them down in very plain black and white. If she has to relate some matter of gossip or a coarse anecdote she is never indecent like Pope or filthy like Swift. Her humor and honesty atone for the broadness of the tale, and one only perceives that in the days of our greatgreat-great-grandfathers a spade was called a spade, and women of the highest culture and refinement occasionally spiced their conversation with a Rabelaisian story or two that is not customary at this day.

Her education was very irregularly conducted. She had the freedom of her father's library and read widely. She learned Latin and Greek, which girls in her time were not supposed to attempt, and acquired a knowledge of French and Italian. The person she relied on to assist her was Edward Wortley, whom she subsequently married. "When I was young," she says in one of her letters, "I was a great admirer of Ovid's 'Metamorphoses,' and that was one of the chief reasons that set me upon thoughts of stealing the

Latin language.

Mr. Wortley was the only person to whom I communicated my design, and he encouraged me in it. I used to study five or six hours a day for two years in my father's library, and got that language whilst everybody else thought I was reading nothing but novels and romances."

Mr. Wortley, who became Mr. WortleyMontagu, was a very rich, a very orderly, a very obstinate and a very dull person, considerably older than his young and lively pupil, but not too dull to fall in love with her. He was a most unexceptionable match, and Lord Dorchester fully approved of it, until the question of "settlements came up. Lord Dorchester wished a larger provision to be made for the benefit of the children of the marriage, if there should be any, and Mr. Wortley Montagu refused to make any such "settlement." Whereupon the father broke off the match and ordered his daughter to see her lover no more. This naturally increased her desire to see him, and after a little time she eloped with and married him. He was prominent in the politics of the time, and when the death of Queen Anne occurred and the Whigs came into power Mr. Wortley presented his wife at court and introduced her to his friends, Congreve,