e who gave her on Thursday
night so cordial and encouraging a reception appeared simply
as a good-looking lady in the bloom of womanhood, attired
in a plain black dress, with easy unrestrained manners....
The lecture might have been a newspaper article, the first
chapter of a book of travels, or the speech of a long-winded
American Ambassador at a Mansion House dinner. All was
exceedingly decorous and diplomatic, slightly gilded here
and there with those commonplace laudations that stir a
British public into the utterance of patriotic plaudits. A
more inoffensive entertainment could hardly be imagined; and
when the six sections into which the lady had divided her
discourse, were exhausted, and her final bow elicited a
renewal of the applause that had accompanied her entrance,
the impression on the departing visitors must have been that
of having spent an hour in company with a well-informed lady
who had gone to America, had seen much to admire there, and,
coming back, had had over the tea-table the talk of the
evening to herself. Whatever the future disquisitions of the
Countess of Landsfeld may be, there is little doubt that
many will go to hear them for the sake of the peculiar
celebrity of the lecturer.

To this, the _Era_ reporter naively added: "Her foreign accent might
belong to any language from Irish to Bavarian."

Lola did not have the field entirely to herself. While she was telling
the St. James's Hall public how to improve their appearance at very
small cost, a rival practitioner, with a _salon_ in Bond Street, was,
in the advertisement columns of the morning papers, announcing her
readiness to furnish the necessary requisites at a very high figure.
This was a "Madame Rachel," some of whose dupes parted with as much as
five hundred guineas, on the understanding that she would make them
"Beautiful for ever!"

Like Lola Montez, "Madame Rachel" brought out a puff pamphlet,
directing attention to her specifics. This production beat the effort
of the Rev. Chauncey Burr, for it bristled with references, to the
Bible and Shakespeare, to Grace Darling and Florence Nightingale.
Among her nostrums was a bottle of "Jordan Water," which she sold at
the modest figure of L15 15s. a flask. Chemical analysis, however,
revealed it to have come, not from Palestine, but from the River
Thames. She also supplied, on exto