Anecdotes by Hannah More.
��that they had been deceived, and were quite in another part of the country V
Johnson afterwards mentioned to Miss Reynolds how much he had been touched with the enthusiasm which was visible in the whole manner of the young authoress, which was evidently genuine and unaffected. Memoirs, i. 49.
London, 1775.
I had yesterday the pleasure of dining in Hill Street, Berkeley Square, at a certain Mrs. Montagu's, a name not totally obscure 2 . The party consisted of herself, Mrs. Carter 3 , Dr. Johnson, Solander 4 , and Matty 5 , Mrs. Boscawen 6 , Miss Reynolds, and Sir Joshua, (the idol of every company ;) some other persons of high rank and less wit, and your humble servant. . . .
Mrs. Montagu received me with the most encouraging kindness ; she is not only the finest genius, but the finest lady I ever saw : she lives in the highest style of magnificence ; her apartments
��1 There seems some mistake in her narrative. Boswell recorded in his Journal : ' In the afternoon we drove over the very heath where Macbeth met the witches according to tradition. . . . We got to Fores at night.' Ib. v. 115. Johnson says : ' We went forwards the same day to Fores, the town to which Macbeth was travelling when he met the weird sisters in his way. This to an Englishman is classick ground. Our imaginations were heated, and our thoughts recalled to their old amusements.' Works, ix. 21.
2 Mrs. Montagu was not yet in her new house in Portman Square, from which Johnson and Boswell were a few years later excluded on account of the offence given by the Life of Lyttelton. Life, iv. 64. H. More writes of it in 1783 : ' To all the magnificence of a very superb London house is added the scenery of a country retirement.' Memoirs, i. 241. In 1784, after spending a
��fortnight with Mrs. Montagu, she writes : * One may say of her, what Johnson has said of somebody else, that " she never opens her mouth but to say something" ' Ib. i. 329.
3 Known as 'the learned Mrs. Carter.' Life, i. 122, n. 4.
' Her calm orderly mind,' wrote H. More (Memoirs, iii. 306), ' dreaded nothing so much as irregularity ; she was therefore most strictly high church, and most scrupulously for bore reading any book, however sound or sober, which proceeded from any other quarter. She would on no account have read Doddridge or Pascal.'
4 Ante, i. 280.
5 Either Dr. Matthew Maty (Ltje, i. 284), or his son Paul Henry Maty (ante, i. 237).
6 She wrote to Hannah More five years later : ' I have claims upon Dr. Johnson ; but as he never knows me when he meets me, they are all stifled in the cradle.' H. More's Memoirs,\. 191. See also Life, iii. 331.
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