wind-filling
to her columns, ultimately found indigestible.

His exhibition of his enemy Lord Dannisburgh, is of the class of noble
portraits we see swinging over inn-portals, grossly unlike in likeness.
The possibility of the man's doing or saying this and that adumbrates the
improbability: he had something of the character capable of it, too much
good sense for the performance. We would think so, and still the shadow
is round our thoughts. Lord Dannisburgh was a man of ministerial tact,
official ability, Pagan morality; an excellent general manager, if no
genius in statecraft. But he was careless of social opinion, unbuttoned,
and a laugher. We know that he could be chivalrous toward women,
notwithstanding the perplexities he brought on them, and this the
Dorset-Diary does not show.

His chronicle is less mischievous as regards Mrs. Warwick than the
paragraphs of Perry Wilkinson, a gossip presenting an image of perpetual
chatter, like the waxen-faced street advertizements of light and easy
dentistry. He has no belief, no disbelief; names the pro-party and the
con; recites the case, and discreetly, over-discreetly; and pictures the
trial, tells the list of witnesses, records the verdict: so the case
went, and some thought one thing, some another thing: only it is reported
for positive that a miniature of the incriminated lady was cleverly
smuggled over to the jury, and juries sitting upon these eases, ever
since their bedazzlement by Phryne, as you know . . . . And then he
relates an anecdote of the husband, said to have been not a bad fellow
before he married his Diana; and the naming of the Goddess reminds him
that the second person in the indictment is now everywhere called 'The
elderly shepherd';--but immediately after the bridal bells this husband
became sour and insupportable, and either she had the trick of putting
him publicly in the wrong, or he lost all shame in playing the churlish
domestic tyrant. The instances are incredible of a gentleman. Perry
Wilkinson gives us two or three; one on the authority of a personal
friend who witnessed the scene; at the Warwick whist-table, where the
fair Diana would let loose her silvery laugh in the intervals. She was
hardly out of her teens, and should have been dancing instead of fastened
to a table. A difference of fifteen years in the ages of the wedded pair
accounts poorly for the husband's conduct, however solemn a business the
game of whist. We read that he burst