to complain of what one loves.  How can you be so careless?—­is it because you don’t love writing?  You should remember I want to know you are safe at Durham.  I shall imagine you have had some fall from your horse, or ill accident by the way, without regard to probability; there is nothing too extravagant for a woman’s and a lover’s fears.  Did you receive my last letter? if you did not, the direction is wrong, you won’t receive this, and my question is in vain.  I find I begin to talk nonsense, and ’tis time to leave off.  Pray, my dear, write to me, or I shall be very mad.”

Montagu was, not to put too fine a point on it, a careless husband.  Not only did he neglect to write to his wife, but he neglected, or forgot, to keep her adequately supplied with money.  She had more than once to remind him of this.  “I wish you would write again to Mr. Phipps, for I don’t hear of any money, and am in the utmost necessity for it,” she told him in November, 1712.  Montagu, even at this time a well-to-do man, found it difficult to part with his money.  A couple of years later, Lady Mary had again to say to him:  “Pray order me some money, for I am in great want, and must run into debt if you don’t do it soon.”  Even in these days Montagu evidently had begun to be miserly.  With all his riches, he never spent a crown when a smaller sum would suffice, and during most of his life he, as Sir Leslie Stephen put it, “devoted himself chiefly to saving money.”

In the winter of 1712, Lady Mary, who was with child, suffered much from ill-health, and this was to some extent aggravated by intense boredom, although of that boredom she wrote good-humouredly enough.

“I don’t believe you expect to hear from me so soon, if I remember you did not so much as desire it, but I will not be so nice to quarrel with you on that point; perhaps you would laugh at that delicacy, which is, however, an attendant of a tender friendship,” she wrote to her husband from Hinchinbrooke at the beginning of December, 1712.

“I opened the closet where I expected to find so many books; to my great disappointment there were only some few pieces of the law, and folios of mathematics; my Lord Hinchinbrook and Mr. Twiman having disposed of the rest.  But as there is no affliction, no more than no happiness, without alloy, I discovered an old trunk of papers, which to my great diversion I found to be the letters of the first Earl of Sandwich; and am in hopes that those from his lady will tend much to my edification, being the most extraordinary lessons of economy that ever I read in my life.  To the glory of your father, I find that his looked upon him as destined to be the honour of the family.

“I walked yesterday two hours on the terrace.  These are the most considerable events that have happened in your absence; excepting that a good-natured robin red-breast kept me company almost all the afternoon with so much good humour and humanity as gives me faith for the piece of charity ascribed to these little creatures in the Children in the Wood, which I have hitherto thought only a poetical ornament to that history.