336 LONDON PARKS & GARDENS 



Lord Portman's house, 22 Portman Square, is where 

 Mrs. Montagu, the Queen of the Blue-Stockings, held 

 her court. The present garden, with spacious lawn, 

 has no horticultural peculiarity, but its historical interest 

 lies in the fact that it was here that Mrs. Montagu 

 entertained the chimney-sweeps, every year on the ist of 

 May. She is said to have done so, to give these poor 

 children *' one happy day in the year," and when the 

 horrors and tragedies attending the lives and often 

 deaths of these cruelly treated little creatures is realised, 

 it is not to be wondered at that one lady was humane 

 enough to befriend them. 



A quaint pathetic poem by Allan Cunningham, 

 written in 1824, records in characteristically stilted 

 language an incident supposed to have occurred to 

 Mrs. Montagu. A sad boy, whose life was spent in 

 climbing flues, is pictured, and one lady he supplicates 

 turns away — " And lo ! another lady came," and spoke 

 kindly to him, asked him why he thus spent his life, 

 listened to his tale of how he was an orphan and " sold 

 to this cruel trade." 



" She stroked the sooty locks and smiled, 

 While o'er the dusky boy, 

 As streams the sunbeam through a cloud, 

 There came a flash of joy. 

 She took him from his cruel trade. 

 And soon the milk-white hue 

 Came to his neck ; he with the muse 

 Sings, ' Bless the Montagu.' " 



Her kindness is recorded in other poems, and in 

 her lifetime took the practical shape of a sumptuous 

 spread of beef and plum-pudding on the lawn of her 

 house in Portman Square. 



