mark that rang the bell; and away her word went over the county:  and had she been an uncharitable woman she could have ruled the county with an iron rod of caricature, so sharp was her touch.  A grain of malice would have sent county faces and characters awry into the currency.  She was wealthy and kindly, and resembled our mother Nature in her reasonable antipathies to one or two things which none can defend, and her decided preference of persons that shone in the sun.  Her word sprang out of her.  She looked at you, and forth it came:  and it stuck to you, as nothing laboured or literary could have adhered.  Her saying of Laetitia Dale:  “Here she comes with a romantic tale on her eyelashes,” was a portrait of Laetitia.  And that of Vernon Whitford:  “He is a Phoebus Apollo turned fasting friar,” painted the sunken brilliancy of the lean long-walker and scholar at a stroke.

Of the young Sir Willoughby, her word was brief; and there was the merit of it on a day when he was hearing from sunrise to the setting of the moon salutes in his honour, songs of praise and Ciceronian eulogy.  Rich, handsome, courteous, generous, lord of the Hall, the feast and the dance, he excited his guests of both sexes to a holiday of flattery.  And, says Mrs. Mountstuart, while grand phrases were mouthing round about him, “You see he has a leg.”

That you saw, of course.  But after she had spoken you saw much more.  Mrs. Mountstuart said it just as others utter empty nothings, with never a hint of a stress.  Her word was taken up, and very soon, from the extreme end of the long drawing-room, the circulation of something of Mrs. Mountstuart’s was distinctly perceptible.  Lady Patterne sent a little Hebe down, skirting the dancers, for an accurate report of it; and even the inappreciative lips of a very young lady transmitting the word could not damp the impression of its weighty truthfulness.  It was perfect!  Adulation of the young Sir Willoughby’s beauty and wit, and aristocratic bearing and mien, and of his moral virtues, was common; welcome if you like, as a form of homage; but common, almost vulgar, beside Mrs. Mountstuart’s quiet little touch of nature.  In seeming to say infinitely less than others, as Miss Isabel Patterne pointed out to Lady Busshe, Mrs. Mountstuart comprised all that the others had said, by showing the needlessness of allusions to the saliently evident.  She was the aristocrat reproving the provincial.  “He is everything you have had the goodness to remark, ladies and dear sirs, he talks charmingly, dances divinely, rides with the air of a commander-in-chief, has the most natural grand pose possible without ceasing for a moment to be the young English gentleman he is.  Alcibiades, fresh from a Louis IV perruquier, could not surpass him:  whatever you please; I could outdo you in sublime comparisons, were I minded to pelt him.  Have you noticed that he has a leg?”