t men are for preserving: an observation of still
reverberating force. Generally in her character of the feminine combatant
there is a turn of phrase, like a dimple near the lips showing her
knowledge that she was uttering but a tart measure of the truth. She had
always too much lambent humour to be the dupe of the passion wherewith,
as she says, 'we lash ourselves into the persuasive speech distinguishing
us from the animals.'

The instances of her drollery are rather hinted by the Diarists for the
benefit of those who had met her and could inhale the atmosphere at a
word. Drolleries, humours, reputed witticisms, are like odours of roast
meats, past with the picking of the joint. Idea is the only vital breath.
They have it rarely, or it eludes the chronicler. To say of the great
erratic and forsaken Lady A****, after she had accepted the consolations
of Bacchus, that her name was properly signified in asterisks 'as she was
now nightly an Ariadne in heaven through her God,' sounds to us a
roundabout, with wit somewhere and fun nowhere. Sitting at the roast we
might have thought differently. Perry Wilkinson is not happier in citing
her reply to his compliment on the reviewers' unanimous eulogy of her
humour and pathos:--the 'merry clown and poor pantaloon demanded of us in
every work of fiction,' she says, lamenting the writer's compulsion to go
on producing them for applause until it is extremest age that knocks
their knees. We are informed by Lady Pennon of 'the most amusing
description of the first impressions of a pretty English simpleton in
Paris'; and here is an opportunity for ludicrous contrast of the French
and English styles of pushing flatteries--'piping to the charmed animal,'
as Mrs. Warwick terms it in another place: but Lady Pennon was acquainted
with the silly woman of the piece, and found her amusement in the
'wonderful truth' of that representation.

Diarists of amusing passages are under an obligation to paint us a
realistic revival of the time, or we miss the relish. The odour of the
roast, and more, a slice of it is required, unless the humorous thing be
preternaturally spirited to walk the earth as one immortal among a number
less numerous than the mythic Gods. 'He gives good dinners,' a candid old
critic said, when asked how it was that he could praise a certain poet.
In an island of chills and fogs, coelum crebris imbribus ac nebulis
foedum, the comic and other perceptions are dependent on the sti