like space for timber.' As to the sensations of
women after the beating down of the walls, she owns that the multitude
of the timorous would yearn in shivering affright for the old
prison-nest, according to the sage prognostic of men; but the flying
of a valiant few would form a vanguard. And we are informed that the
beginning of a motive life with women must be in the head, equally with
men (by no means a truism when she wrote). Also that 'men do not so much
fear to lose the hearts of thoughtful women as their strict attention
to their graces.' The present market is what 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 repr