Nov. 5. 1853.] 



NOTES AND QUEKIES. 



431 



in doing any act or acts necessary to transfer to her an 

 annuity of two hundred pounds per annum, purchased 

 in Sir Isaac Newton's name, which I hold for her in 

 trust, as appears by a declaration of trust in that 

 behalf." 



This codicil immediately became the subject 

 of remark, and the terms of it seem to have 

 been understood as they would be now. Flam- 

 steed, writing in July, 1715 (Halifax died in May), 

 says: 



" If common fame be true, he died worth 1 50,000?. ; 

 out of which he gave Mrs. Barton, Sir I. Newton's 

 niece, for her excellent conversation [the Italics are 

 Baily's, the original, I suppose, underlined], a curious 

 house, 5000/. with lands, jewels, plate, money, and 

 household furniture, to the value of 20,000/. or more." 



I pay no attention to the statement that (Biogr. 

 Brit, Montague, note BB.) Lord Halifax was dis- 

 appointed in a second marriage. It amounts only 

 to this, that Lord Shaftsbury, having a certain 

 lady in his heart and in his eye, was afraid he had 

 a rival, and described the person talked of in terms 

 which make it pretty certain that Halifax was 

 intended. But it by no means follows that be- 

 cause a certain person is " talked of" for a lady, 

 and a lover put in fear by the rumour, the person 

 is really a rival : and not even a biographer would 

 have shown himself so unfit for a novelist as to 

 have drawn such a conclusion, unless he had been 

 biassed by the wish to show that Halifax was at- 

 tached to another than Mrs. Barton. 



It must of course be supposed that the intro- 

 duction of Montague to Newton's niece was a 

 consequence of his acquaintance with Newton, and 

 took place in or near 1696, when Newton came to 

 London, where his niece soon began to reside with 

 him. And since, in 1706, the connexion, what- 

 ever it was, had been of long standing, we may 

 infer that it had probably commenced in 1700. 

 The case is then as follows. Montague received 

 into his house, as " superintendent of his domestic 

 affairs" after the death of his wife, the niece of 

 his old and revered friend Newton, a conspicuous 

 officer of the crown, a member of Parliament, and 

 otherwise one of the most famous men living. This 

 niece had been partly educated by Newton ; she had 

 lived in his house ; we know of no other protector 

 that she could have had, in London ; and the sup- 

 position that she left any roof except Newton's to 

 take shelter under that of Montague, would be 

 purely gratuitous. She was unmarried, beautiful, 

 and gay ; and probably not so much as, certainly 

 not much more than, twenty years old. A hand- 

 some annuity was bought for her in Newton's 

 name, and held in trust by Halifax : if it had been 

 bought % Newton, Conduitt would have mentioned 

 it in his list of the benefactions which Newton's 

 relatives received from him, especially after the 



Sublicity which it had obtained from Halifax's will. 

 !hat she did not tenant the housekeeper's room 



while the friends of Halifax were round his table, 

 may be inferred from the epigrams, poor as they 

 are, which were made in her honour as a celebrated 

 beauty and wit, in a collection of verses (reprinted 

 in Dryden's Miscellanies) on the best known toasts 

 of the day. Halifax bequeathed her a provision 

 which might have suited his widow, in terms which 

 must have been intended to show that she had 

 been either his wife or his mistress ; while in the 

 same document he brought prominently forward 

 his respect for Newton, the fact of her being 

 Newton's niece, and the annuity which he had 

 bought for her in Newton's name. An uncon- 

 tradicted paragraph in the life of Halifax, pub- 

 lished immediately after the will, and evidently 

 not intended to bring forward any fact not per- 

 fectly well known, records her residence in the 

 house of that nobleman and the consequent ru- 

 mours concerning her character, affirms that she 

 was a virtuous woman, and refers to the will to 

 prove it : though the will denies it in the plainest 

 English, on any supposition except that of a pri- 

 vate marriage. Finally, the lady married a re- 

 spectable man after the death of Lord Halifax, 

 and with him lived in the house of her illustrious 

 uncle. 



That she was either the wife or the mistress of 

 Halifax, I take to be established ; it is the natural 

 conclusion from the facts above stated, all made 

 public during her life, all left uncontradicted by 

 herself, by her husband, by her daughter, by Lord 

 Lymington her son-in-law, and by the uncle who 

 had stood to her in the place of a father. It is 

 impossible that Newton could have been ignorant 

 that his niece was living in Montague's house, 

 enjoyed an annuity bought in his own name, and 

 was regarded by the world as the mistress of his 

 friend and political patron. The language of the 

 codicil shows that, be the nature of the connexion 

 what it might, Halifax meant to tell the world 

 that it might be proclaimed in all its relation to 

 the name of Newton. To those who cannot, 

 under all the circumstances, believe the connexion 

 to have been what is called platonic, the proba- 

 bility that there was a private marriage is pre- 

 cisely the probability that Newton would not have 

 sanctioned the dishonour of his own niece : and- 

 even if the connexion were only that of friendship, 

 Newton must have sanctioned the appearance and 

 the forms of a dishonourable intimacy : the co- 

 habitation, the settlement, and the defiance of 

 opinion. Now there is no reason to suppose of 

 Newton that he would be a party to either pro- 

 ceeding, which would not apply as well to any 

 man then alive : to Locke, for instance. Looking 

 at the morals of the day, we are by no means jus- 

 tified in throwing off at once, with disgust, the 

 bare idea of the possibility of a distinguished 

 philosopher consenting to an illicit intercourse 

 between his friend and his niece : we are bound. 



