hen she was a girl, she did really swim,
they say, across the Shannon and back to win a bet for her brother Lord
Levellier, the colonel of cavalry, who left an arm in Egypt, and changed
his way of life to become a wizard, as the common people about his
neighbourhood supposed, because he foretold the weather and had cures
for aches and pains without a doctor's diploma. But we know now that
he was only a mathematician and astronomer, all for inventing military
engines. The brother and sister were great friends in their youth, when
he had his right arm to defend her reputation with; and she would have
done anything on earth to please him.

There is a picture of her in an immense flat white silk hat trimmed with
pale blue, like a pavilion, the broadest brim ever seen, and she
simply sits on a chair; and Venus the Queen of Beauty would have been
extinguished under that hat, I am sure; and only to look at Countess
Fanny's eye beneath the brim she has tipped ever so slightly in her
artfulness makes the absurd thing graceful and suitable. Oh! she was a
cunning one. But you must be on your guard against the scandalmongers
and collectors of anecdotes, and worst of any, the critic, of our
Galleries of Art; for she being in almost all of them (the principal
painters of the day were on their knees for the favour of a sitting),
they have to speak of her pretty frequently, and they season their dish,
the coxcombs do, by hinting a knowledge of her history.

'Here we come to another portrait of the beautiful but, we fear, naughty
Countess of Cressett.'

You are to imagine that they know everything, and they are so indulgent
when they drop their blot on a lady's character.

They can boast of nothing more than having read Nymriey's Letters and
Correspondence, published, fortunately for him, when he was no longer to
be called to account below for his malicious insinuations, pretending
to decency in initials and dashes: That man was a hater of women and the
clergy. He was one of the horrid creatures who write with a wink at you,
which sets the wicked part of us on fire: I have known it myself, and I
own it to my shame; and if I happened to be ignorant of the history of
Countess Fanny, I could not refute his wantonness. He has just the same
benevolent leer for a bishop. Give me, if we are to make a choice, the
beggar's breech for decency, I say: I like it vastly in preference to a
Nymney, who leads you up to the curtain and agitates it, a