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 1st 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 hash of joy. 
She took him from his cruel trade, 
And soon the milk-white hue 
Came to his neck ; he with the muse 
Sings, 4 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. 
