The circle of the British Peerage has included many "vagabonds," some of whom have worn coronets in our own day; but it is doubtful whether any one of them all has had the _wanderlust_ in his veins to the same degree as Edward Wortley Montagu, whose adventurous life was ignominiously ended by a partridge-bone more than a century and a quarter ago.
It would have been strange if this blue-blooded "rolling-stone" had been a normal man, since he had for mother that most wayward and eccentric woman, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who dazzled England by her beauty and brilliant intellect, and amused it by her oddities in the days of the first two Georges. This grandson of the Duke of Kingston, and great-grandson of the first Earl of Sandwich was "his mother's boy"--with much of his mother's physical and mental charms, and more than her eccentricities, as his story abundantly proves.
As a child of three he accompanied his parents to Constantinople, where his father, the Hon. Sydney Montagu, was sent as our Ambassador; and there he won a place in history at a very early age as the first English child to be inoculated for the small-pox. Probably, too, it was his boyish life in Turkey that inoculated him with the passion for all things Eastern, that so largely influenced his later life.
His adventures began when his parents returned to London, and the boy was sent as a pupil to Westminster. It was not long before he rebelled against the discipline and trammels of school-boy life; and one day he threw down his Euclid and Cæsar and vanished as completely as if the earth had swallowed him. Every street, court, and alley was searched in vain for the truant; advertisements and handbills offering a reward for his recovery were equally futile. Not a trace of the runaway was to be found anywhere.
One day, a good twelve months after his family had concluded that the lad was dead, or, at least, lost for ever, Mr Foster, a friend of his father, chanced to be in Blackwall when he heard a familiar voice crying fish. "That is the voice of young Montagu," he exclaimed, and promptly despatched his servant to bring the boy to him. The fish-seller innocently came back, his basket of plaice and flounders on his head, and was at once recognised by Mr Foster as the truant son of Lady Mary.