Her son, EDWARD WORTLEY MONTAGU (1713-1776), author and traveller, inherited something of his mother's gift and more than her eccentricity. He was born in May 1713, twice ran away from Winchester School, and the second time made his way as far as Oporto. He was then sent to travel with a tutor in the West Indies, and afterwards with a keeper to Holland. He made, how ever, a serious study of Arabic at Leyden (1741), and returned twenty years later to prosecute his studies. His father made him a meagre allowance, and he was heavily encumbered with debt. He was M.P. for Huntingdon in 1747, and was one of the sec retaries at the conference of Aix-la-Chapelle. In 1751 he was involved in a disreputable gaming quarrel in Paris, and was im prisoned for eleven days in the Chatelet. He continued to sit in parliament, and wrote Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Antient Republics . . . (1759). His father left him an annuity of 4000, the bulk of the property going to Lady Bute. He set out for extended travel in the East, lived at Venice and died at Padua on April 29, 1776.
Lady Mary's "Town Eclogues" were published in a pirated edition as Court Poems in 1716. Of her famous Letters from the East she made a copy shortly after her return to England. She gave the MS. to Benjamin Sowden, a clergyman of Rotterdam, in 1761. After Lady
Mary's death this was recovered by the earl of Bute, but meanwhile an unauthenticated edition, supposed to have been prepared by John Cleland, appeared (1763), and an additional volume, probably spurious, was printed in 1767. The rest of the correspondence printed by Lord Wharncliffe in the ,edition of her letters is edited from originals in the Wortley collection. This edition (1837) contained "Introductory Anecdotes" by Lady Bute's daughter, Lady Louisa Stuart. A more critical edition of the text, with the "Anecdotes," and a "Memoir" by W. Moy Thomas, appeared in 1861. A selection of the letters arranged to give a continuous account of her life, by Mr. A. R. Ropes, was published in 1892 ; and another by R. Brimley Johnson in "Everyman's Library" in 1906. See also George Paston, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her Times (1907), which contains some hitherto unpublished letters. Lady Mary's journal was preserved by her daughter, Lady Bute, till shortly before her death, when she burnt it. There is a full and amusing account of Edward Wortley Montagu in Nichols's Anecdotes of Literature, iv. 625-656; L. Melville, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1925) ; Iris Barry, Portrait of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1928).