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.

Another person whose style of speaking the lady took off very
amusingly was one who would scarcely object to suffer by the side
of Lord Byron--I mean Lamartine, who had visited her in the course
of his travels. The peculiarity which attracted her ridicule was
an over-refinement of manner: according to my lady's imitation of
Lamartine (I have never seen him myself), he had none of the
violent grimace of his countrymen, and not even their usual way of
talking, but rather bore himself mincingly, like the humbler sort