She Set Great
Value Upon The Ancient French {20} (Not Norman Blood, For That She
Vilified), But Did Not At
All appreciate that which we call in this
country "an old family." She had a vast idea of the Cornish
Miners
on account of their race, and said, if she chose, she could give me
the means of rousing them to the most tremendous enthusiasm.
Such are the topics on which the lady mainly conversed, but very
often she would descend to more worldly chat, and then she was no
longer the prophetess, but the sort of woman that you sometimes
see, I am told, in London drawing-rooms - cool, decisive in manner,
unsparing of enemies, full of audacious fun, and saying the
downright things that the sheepish society around her is afraid to
utter. I am told that Lady Hester was in her youth a capital
mimic, and she showed me that not all the queenly dulness to which
she had condemned herself, not all her fasting and solitude, had
destroyed this terrible power. The first whom she crucified in my
presence was poor Lord Byron. She had seen him, it appeared, I
know not where, soon after his arrival in the East, and was vastly
amused at his little affectations. He had picked up a few
sentences of the Romantic, with which he affected to give orders to
his Greek servant. I can't tell whether Lady Hester's mimicry of
the bard was at all close, but it was amusing; she attributed to
him a curiously coxcombical lisp.
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