53 
losing historical perspective. Marcus Aurelius did not persecute 
the Christians because they were Christians, but because they 
would not serve in the Roman armies at that time. They were 
considered inimical to the Roman Empire, and it was as politicians 
and not as Christians that they were persecuted. And if he did 
persecute them—persecution was not yet dead. He put before 
himself a high ideal of a God-fearing man, though without 
superstition. 

LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU, 
(14689—1762). 
By FRED. J. GRANT. J.P. 25th October, 1904. 
Probably there was no woman of the Augustan age who 
possessed the same varied abilities, the same brilliancy of wit, or 
had the same chequered experience as fell to the lot of Mary 
Pierrepont, afterwards Lady Mary Montagu. She travelled in 
countries previously little visited by Englishwomen, she explored 
the harems and other recesses of Eastern life never before and 
seldom since thrown open to the eyes of a woman from the west. 
She wrote of her travels in a most entertaining manner, with a 
marked felicity and facility of expression. She ranks among the 
first of English letter writers, she rendered eminent service to 
science, and she was not without merit as a poetess. Hers were 
those lines for which Byron had such a strange fancy :— 
‘¢But when the long hours of public are past, 
And we meet with champagne and a chicken at last.’’ 
Nearly all the seventy years of her life she seemed to live under 
a fierce light. She had ‘‘one crowded hour of glorious life” 
when taken—a child of eight—to be the darling of the 
Kit-Cat Club of wits. Throughout life she was alternately 
