“MATRIMONY.—­A gentleman who hath filled two succeeding seats in Parliament, is near sixty years of age, lives in great splendour and hospitality, and from whom a considerable estate must pass if he dies without issue, hath no objection to marry any lady, provided the party be of genteel birth, polished manners, and about to become a mother.  Letters directed to ——­ Brecknock, Esq., at Wills’s Coffeehouse, facing the Admiralty, will be honoured with due attention, secrecy, and every possible mark of respect.”

At this time Montagu was the father of three children—­two sons (one a black boy of thirteen, who was his favourite companion) and a daughter; but they all lacked the sanction of the altar.

A lady answering these delicate requirements was actually found, and Montagu would probably have graduated as a respectable husband and father of another man’s child had not his vagabond career been cut tragically short.  One day, when he was dining at Padua with Romney, the famous artist, a partridge-bone lodged in the old man’s throat, and refused to budge.  He was suffocating; his face grew purple—­almost black.  In terrified haste a priest was summoned to administer the last consolations of religion; but the dying man would have none of him.  When he was asked in what faith he wished to leave the world, he gasped, “A good Mussulman, I hope.”  A few moments later Edward Wortley Montagu, who had played more parts on the world’s stage than almost any other man who ever lived, was a corpse.  This grandson of a Duke had begun his life of adventure as a fish-hawker, and ended it as “a good Mussulman.”

CHAPTER XIX

FOOTLIGHTS AND CORONETS

Ever since that tough old soldier Charles, first Earl of Monmouth and third Earl of Peterborough, hauled down his flag before the battery of Anastasia Robinson’s charms, and made a Countess of his victor, a coronet has dazzled the eyes of many an actress with its rainbow allurement, and has proved the passport by which she has stepped from the stage to the gilded circle which environs the throne.

The hero of the Peninsula and the terror of the French was an old man, with one foot in the grave, when the “nightingale” of the London theatres brought him to his gouty knees; but so resolute was he to give her his name that, to make assurance doubly sure, he faced the altar twice with her, before starting on his honeymoon journey across the Channel.

Pope, who was a friend of the amorous Earl, draws a pathetic picture of him in the latter unromantic days of his romance.  During a visit to Bevis Mount, near Southampton, the poet writes: