On 5 July 1718 Wortley sailed from Constantinople with his wife, children and their entourage, including nineteen servants, on board the Preston, a newly built warship which the English government had sent out to bring its ambassador home. It cannot have been a happy voyage. Wortley's diplomatic mission had been a failure, as he must now have been compelled to admit even to himself; the ambassadorship was the last government post he was to hold, and he spent much of the rest of his life in an irritable quest to win sufficient recompense for his dismissal and for the expenses he had incurred. Lady Mary must also have been bitterly disappointed, for she had by now developed a taste for travel and could have expected to remain in the East for at least another four years.

Perhaps because they were compiled with publication in mind rather than as a purely personal record, the Embassy Letters reveal little of Lady Mary's feelings. However, the course the Preston followed must have provided some compensation. It was a journey for which Lady Mary's extensive reading of classical authors had prepared her, and she enjoyed it to the full, as her exuberant letter to the Abbé Conti of 31 July shows. Having passed through the Dardanelles, the Preston entered the Aegean Sea and then dropped anchor off Troy. Lady Mary 'took the pain of rising at two in the morning' to view the ruins, and even hired an ass, the only transport available, to tour the ancient walls. Pressing onwards, the ship passed Mytilene, Lesbos and Cape Sounion and then cut across the ocean to Sicily, where Mount Etna could be seen in the distance, before turning south towards the coast of North Africa. A four-day halt here enabled Lady Mary to visit Tunis, travelling by night since she found the heat of the sun quite intolerable, and the ruins of Carthage. For Wortley and Lady Mary, the final stretch of the sea voyage was across the Mediterranean to Livorno and Genoa. Here they disembarked, leaving the Preston to carry their two children and some of their servants back to London by sea; it proved a dangerous voyage - several hostile Spanish vessels were encountered, and many of the crew were struck down by disease - and the children did not reach home until the following January.

After being confined in quarantine for ten days in Genoa, a time spent pleasantly enough in a fine house in a fashionable suburb, Wortley and Lady Mary travelled north across the Alps to Lyons and then on to Paris. Here she was pleased to have an unexpected meeting with her sister Lady Mar, and together they enjoyed visiting the town and making excursions to Versailles and other palaces and gardens nearby. Then there was the Channel crossing from Calais (as on the outward crossing, rough seas threw the boat violently about) and the final journey from Dover to London.

From Dover, Lady Mary wrote to the Abbé Conti that she could not 'help looking with partial eyes on my native land'. Was it simple travel-weariness, and relief at her safe arrival after so long and rigorous a journey, that led her to comment that all we get by travelling is 'a fruitless desire of mixing the different pleasures and conveniences which are given to different parts of the world and cannot meet in any one of them'? At home again in London society, Lady Mary fell easily into her former routine of court assemblies and soirées, gossip and rivalries, reading and

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letter- and essay-writing. But the final chapter of her life, those two decades and more passed in voluntary exile in France and Italy, suggest that this journey to the East, with all its excitement and curiosities, had indeed stimulated in her a lifelong taste for the 'pleasures and conveniences' of other lands.

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Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. 1988. Embassy to Constantinople: The Travels of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu / introduced by Dervla Murphy; edited and complied by Christopher Pick. New York: New Amsterdam