“I expect a letter next post to tell me you are well in London and that your business will not detain you long from her that cannot be happy without you.”

Even in these early days of marriage Montagu seemed to have no love for domestic life, and often he stayed in London when he could have been in the country with his wife, or had her with him in town.  “As much as you say I love the town, if you think it necessary for your interest to stay some time here, I would not advise you to neglect a certainty for an uncertainty? but I believe if you pass the Christmas here, great matters will be expected from your hospitality:  however, you are a better judge than I am.”  So Lady Mary wrote from Hinchinbrooke in the first week of December.  She did not disguise from him the tedium of her existence.

“I continue indifferently well, and endeavour as much as I can to preserve myself from spleen and melancholy; not for my own sake; I think that of little importance; but in the condition I am, I believe it may be of very ill consequence; yet, passing whole days alone as I do, I do not always find it possible, and my constitution will sometimes get the better of my reason.  Human nature itself, without any additional misfortunes, furnishes disagreeable meditations enough.  Life itself to make it supportable, should not be considered too near; my reason represents to me in vain the inutility of serious reflections.  The idle mind will sometimes fall into contemplations that serve for nothing but to ruin the health, destroy good humour, hasten old age and wrinkles, and bring on an habitual melancholy.  ’Tis a maxim with me to be young as long as one can:  there is nothing can pay one for that invaluable ignorance which is the companion of youth; those sanguine groundless hopes, and that lively vanity, which make all the happiness of life.  To my extreme mortification I grow wiser every day than other [sic].  I don’t believe Solomon was more convinced of the vanity of temporal affairs than I am; I lose all taste of this world, and I suffer myself to be bewitched by the charms of the spleen, though I know and foresee all the irremediable mischiefs arising from it.  I am insensibly fallen into the writing you a melancholy letter, after all my resolutions to the contrary; but I do not enjoin you to read it:  make no scruple of flinging it into the fire at the first dull line.  Forgive the ill effects of my solitude, and think me as I am,

“Ever yours.”

There was still hope in the hearts of Lady Mary and her husband that it might be possible to effect a reconciliation with Lord Dorchester.  Since apparently the Marquess was not directly approachable by either of them, they perforce had to seek an intermediary.  Such an one, they trusted at one time, would be one of Lady Mary’s relatives, Lord Pierrepont of Hanslope.  To this matter there are many allusions in the correspondence, “The Bishop of Salisbury writes me word that he hears my Lord Pierrepont declares