The Autobiography [Fictitious] of Edward Wortley Montagu (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: EDWARD WORTLEY MONTAGU. CHAPTER I. My mother was a wit. She wrote poetry, composed epigrams, penned the liveliest letters, and scribbled off the bitterest ballads on all her friends and acquaintances. Her tongue was always tipped with gall and bitterness; her pen was finely pointed with venom. Scandal was her great delight; her eye flashed with glee at a double meaning; a loose anecdote of one of her lady loves lifted her into Paradise for the day. Happily for her, the enchanting freedom of her female friends was such, that she was seldom without the ambrosial essence which made her blest. She kept a diary, in which she noted down, in the broadest terms, every little slip, or sally, or frail foible which her dearly beloved of the masculine, feminine, or neuter gender?and these last constitute a great proportion of what is called "the best society"?committed, or were said to have committed; and when the story was not in itself particularly piquant, she spiced and seasoned it in her own fashion, so as to render it hot, agreeable, or stimulating to the depraved taste of those in whom her heart sought comfortable fellowship. Her heart, did I say ? Alas! she had no heart ! What female wit ever had? There was, it is true, a globular piece of flesh somewhere between the right and left lung, and this performed themerely animal functions of that noble organ, but resembled its prototype only as an automaton might resemble a man. It was a saddening thing to look upon so fair an outside,, nd reflect how base and black was all within. The asp urking under roses, the gilded chalice filled with poison, the whited sepulchre covering rottenness?these are hackneyed images, or I would have likened her to one and all. Yet what more appropriate picture of false man or heartless woman than this ...