Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) by Lewis Melville
page 262 of 345 (75%)
page 262 of 345 (75%)
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comedy, "Love in Several Masques," of which, when it was published in
the following year, he sent her a copy. "I have presumed to send your Ladyship a copy of the play which you did me the honour of reading three acts last spring and hope it may meet as light a censure from your Ladyship's judgment as then; for while your goodness permits me (what I esteem the greatest and indeed only happening of my life) to offer my unworthy performances to your perusal, it will be entirely from your sentence that they will be regarded or disesteemed by me." Fielding wrote Lady Mary another letter about four years later: "I hope your Ladyship will honour the scenes which I presume to lay before you, with your perusal. As they are written on a model I never yet attempted, I am exceedingly anxious less they should find less mercy from you than my lighter productions. It will be a slight compensation to 'The Modern Husband' that your Ladyship's censure will defend him from the possibility of any other reproof, since your least approbation will always give me pleasure, infinitely superior to the loudest applauses of a theatre. For whatever has passed your judgment may, I think, without any imputation of immodesty, refer want of success to want of judgment in an audience. I shall do myself the honour of waiting upon your Ladyship at Twickenham to receive my sentence." One evening when she arrived home, after having ridden twenty miles in the moonlight, she found a box of books, and pouncing upon her cousin Fielding's works, sat up all night reading. "I think _Joseph Andrews_ better than his _Foundling._[13] I believe I was the more struck with it, having at present a Fanny in my own house, not only by the name, which happens to be the same, but the extraordinary beauty, joined with an understanding yet more extraordinary at her age, which is but few months past sixteen: she is |
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