s late.'

After alluding to the soft influence of her beauty and ingenuousness on
the vexed hostess, the kindly old marchioness adds, that it was no wonder
she was late, 'for just before starting from home she had broken loose
from her husband for good, and she entered the room absolutely
houseless!' She was not the less 'astonishingly brilliant.' Her
observations were often 'so unexpectedly droll I laughed till I cried.'
Lady Pennon became in consequence one of the stanch supporters of Mrs.
Warwick.

Others were not so easily won. Perry Wilkinson holds a balance when it
goes beyond a question of her wit and beauty. Henry Wilmers puts the case
aside, and takes her as he finds her. His cousin, the clever and cynical
Dorset Wilmers, whose method of conveying his opinions without stating
them was famous, repeats on two occasions when her name appears in his
pages, 'handsome, lively, witty'; and the stressed repetition of
calculated brevity while a fiery scandal was abroad concerning the lady,
implies weighty substance--the reservation of a constable's truncheon,
that could legally have knocked her character down to the pavement. We
have not to ask what he judged. But Dorset Wilmers was a political
opponent of the eminent Peer who yields the second name to the scandal,
and politics in his day flushed the conceptions of men. His short
references to 'that Warwick-Dannisburgh affair' are not verbally
malicious. He gets wind of the terms of Lord Dannisburgh's will and
testament, noting them without comment. The oddness of the instrument in
one respect may have served his turn; we have no grounds for thinking him
malignant. The death of his enemy closes his allusions to Mrs. Warwick.
He was growing ancient, and gout narrowed the circle he whirled in. Had
he known this 'handsome, lively, witty' apparition as a woman having
political and social views of her own, he would not, one fancies, have
been so stingless. Our England exposes a sorry figure in his
Reminiscences. He struck heavily, round and about him, wherever he moved;
he had by nature a tarnishing eye that cast discolouration. His unadorned
harsh substantive statements, excluding the adjectives, give his Memoirs
the appearance of a body of facts, attractive to the historic Muse, which
has learnt to esteem those brawny sturdy giants marching club on
shoulder, independent of henchman, in preference to your panoplied
knights with their puffy squires, once her favourites, and