lses, she had not a shred of principle to take the
place of the motive of self-interest, which hitherto had been so
peremptory in its exactions. What she was in delicacy in 1791, that
she remained in 1796,--five years after the disappearance of her
social disabilities; a pretty fair proof that what she possessed of it
was but skin deep, the result of a diligent observance of Greville's
proprieties, for her personal advantage, not the token of a noble
inner spirit struggling from excusable defilement to the light. "She
does the honours of the house with great attention and desire to
please," wrote Greville's correspondent of 1791, before quoted, "but
wants a little refinement of manners, in which, in the course of six
years, I wonder she has not made greater progress." "She is all Nature
and yet all Art," said Sir Gilbert Elliot, in 1796; "that is to say,
her manners are perfectly unpolished, of course very easy, though not
with the ease of good breeding, but of a barmaid; excessively good
humoured, and wishing to please and be admired by all ages and sorts
of persons that come in her way; but besides considerable natural
understanding, she has acquired, since her marriage, some knowledge of
history and of the arts, and one wonders at the application and pains
she has taken to make herself what she is. With men her language and
conversation are exaggerations of anything I ever heard anywhere; and
I was wonderfully struck with these inveterate remains of her origin,
though the impression was very much weakened by seeing the other
ladies of Naples." "I thought her a very handsome, vulgar woman,"
curtly commented the lieutenant of a frigate which visited Naples in
the summer of 1798, while hunting for Nelson in the game of
cross-purposes that preceded the Nile.[70] Allowing for difference of
observers, it is plain that the Lady Hamilton whom Nelson now met, had
not improved in essentials over the Emma Hart of a half-dozen years
before.

Two years afterwards, the verdict of these men was confirmed by Mrs.
St. George,[71] a lady in London society, who viewed her possibly with
something of the repugnant prejudice of a refined and cultivated
woman, yet evidently measured her words calmly, even in her private
journal. "I think her bold, daring, vain even to folly, and stamped
with the manners of her first situation much more strongly than one
would suppose, after having represented Majesty, and lived in good
company fifteen yea