But as there is no affliction, no more than no happiness, without alloy, I discovered an old trunk of papers, which to my great diversion I found to be the letters of the first Earl of Sandwich; and am in hopes that those from his lady will tend much to my edification, being the most extraordinary lessons of economy that ever I read in my life.

To the glory of your father, I find that _his_ looked upon him as destined to be the honour of the family.
"I walked yesterday two hours on the terrace.

These are the most considerable events that have happened in your absence; excepting that a good-natured robin red-breast kept me company almost all the afternoon with so much good humour and humanity as gives me faith for the piece of charity ascribed to these little creatures in the Children in the Wood, which I have hitherto thought only a poetical ornament to that history.
"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.