,
if impartiality consists in punching almost every one she passed, did not
fail to give our heroine a black eye, speaking of her as "in that set to
which Mrs. Jameson belonged, who make women blush and men grow insolent."

Sir Charles and his wife next visited Paris with the intention of writing
a book. Their letters carried them into every circle of Parisian society,
and in each the popularity of Lady Morgan was unbounded. Madame Jerome
Bonaparte wrote to her: "The French admire you more than any one who has
appeared here since the battle of Waterloo in the form of an
Englishwoman." When _France_ appeared the clamor of abuse in England was
enough to appall a very stout heart. John Wilson Croker was one of her
most bitter assailants, and attempted to annihilate her in the
_Quarterly_. She balanced matters by caricaturing him as "Counsellor
Crawley" in her next novel, in a way that hit and hurt, and by a witticism
which lives, while his envenomed sentences are forgotten. Some one was
telling her that Croker was among the crowd who thought they could have
managed the battle of Waterloo much better than Wellington, whose success,
in their estimation, was only a fortunate mistake. She exclaimed, "Oh, I
can believe it. He had his secret for winning the battle: he had only to
put his _Notes on Boswell's Johnson_ in front of the British lines, and
all the Bonapartes that ever existed _could never have got through them_!"
Maginn, in _Blackwood_, gave unmerciful cuts at her superficial opinions,
ultra sentiments and chambermaid French. _Fraser's Magazine_ complimented
her sardonically on her simple style, being happy to observe that she had
reduced the number of languages used, as the Sibyl did her books, to
three, wisely discarding German, Spanish, the dead and Oriental languages.
But she received the cannonade, which would have crushed some women, with
perfect equanimity. As a compensation, she was the toast of the day, and
at some grand reception had a raised dais only a little lower than that
provided for the duchess de Berri. At a dinner at Baron Rothschild's,
Careme, the Delmonico of those times, surprised her with a column of
ingenious confectionery architecture on which was inscribed her name spun
in sugar. It was a more equivocal compliment when Walter Scott christened
two pet donkeys Hannah More and Lady Morgan.

_Florence Macarthy_, another novel, attacking the social and political
abuses in Irish government, was her