ous experiment,
but after a while their mutual qualities adjusted themselves. He kept her
steady, and she roused him from indolent repose. As a critic of that time
says: "She was as bustling, restless, energetic and pushing as he was
modest, retiring and unaffected." Lover gives this picture of them: "There
was Lady Morgan, with her irrepressible vivacity, her humor that indulged
in the most audacious illustrations, and her candor which had small
respect for time or place in its expression, and who, by the side of her
tranquil, steady, contemplative husband, suggested the notion of a Barbary
colt harnessed to a patient English draught-horse."

She had a certain light, jaunty air peculiarly Irish, celebrated by Leigh
Hunt in verses which embody a faithful portrait:

And dear Lady Morgan, see, see where she comes,
With her pulses all beating for freedom like drums,
So Irish, so modish, so mixtish, so wild,
So committing herself, as she talks, like a child;
So trim, yet so easy, polite, yet high-hearted,
That Truth and she, try all she can, won't be parted.
She'll put on your fashions, your latest new air,
And then talk so frankly, she'll make you all stare.
Mrs. Hall may say "Oh!" and Miss Edgeworth say "Fie!"
But my lady will know the what and the why.
Her books, a like mixture, are so very clever
That Jove himself swore he could read them for ever,
Plot, character, freakishness, all are so good,
And the heroine herself playing tricks in a hood.

After a happy year with her patrons Glorvina married and moved to a home
of her own in Kildare street, Dublin, whence she writes to Lady Stanley:
"With respect to authorship, I fear it is over. I have been making
chair-covers instead of periods, hanging curtains instead of raising
systems, and cheapening pots and pans instead of selling sentiment and
philosophy." But even during this first busy year of housekeeping she was
working upon _O'Donnel_, another national tale, for which she was paid
five hundred and fifty pounds. It was highly praised by Sir Walter Scott,
and sold with rapidity, but her Liberal politics made her unpopular with
the leading Tory journalism of England. In point of pitiless invective the
criticism of the _Quarterly_ and _Blackwood_ has perhaps never been
exceeded. Her books were denounced as pestilent, and the public advised
against maintaining her acquaintance. Miss Martineau, an impartial critic