“I was surprised to find here the only beautiful young woman I have seen at Vienna, and not only beautiful, but genteel, witty, and agreeable, of a great family, and who had been the admiration of the town.  I could not forbear shewing my surprise at seeing a nun like her.  She made me a thousand obliging compliments, and desired me to come often.  It will be an infinite pleasure to me, (said she, sighing,) to see you; but I avoid, with the greatest care, seeing any of my former acquaintance, and whenever they come to our convent, I lock myself in my cell.  I observed tears come into her eyes, which touched me extremely, and I began to talk to her in that strain of tender pity she inspired me with; but she would not own to me that she is not perfectly happy.  I have since endeavoured to learn the real cause of her retirement, without being able to get any other account, but that every body was surprised at it, and nobody guessed the reason.

“I have been several times to see her; but it gives me too much melancholy to see so agreeable a young creature buried alive, and I am not surprised that nuns have so often inspired violent passions; the pity one naturally feels for them, when they seem worthy of another destiny, making an easy way for yet more tender sentiments; and I never in my life had so little charity for the Roman-catholic religion as since I see the misery it occasions; so many poor unhappy women! and the gross superstition of the common people, who are, some or other of them, day and night offering bits of candle to the wooden figures that are set up almost in every street.  The processions I see very often, are a pageantry as offensive, and apparently contradictory to all common sense, as the pagodas of China.  God knows whether it be the womanly spirit of contradiction that works in me; but there never before was so much zeal against popery in the heart of,

“Dear madam, &c.”

In November the Montagus interrupted their stay at Vienna to visit some of the German Courts.  They went to Prague, where the attire of the ladies amused Lady Mary.  “I have been visited by some of the most considerable ladies, whose relations I know at Vienna,” she wrote to Lady Mar.  “They are dressed after the fashions there, as people at Exeter imitate those of London; that is, the imitation is more excessive than the original; ’tis not easy to describe what extraordinary figures they make.  The person is so much lost between head-dress and petticoat, they have as much occasion to write upon their backs ‘This is a woman,’ for the information of travellers, as ever sign-post painter had to write, ‘This is a bear.’” From Prague to Dresden, travelling thither by a most alarming route: