The prophetess announced to me that we were upon the eve of a stupendous convulsion, which would destroy the then recognised value of all property upon earth; and declaring that those only who should be in the East at the time of the great change could hope for greatness in the new life that was now close at hand, she advised me, whilst there was yet time, to dispose of my property in poor frail England, and gain a station in Asia.  She told me that, after leaving her, I should go into Egypt, but that in a little while I should return into Syria.  I secretly smiled at this last prophecy as a “bad shot,” for I had fully determined after visiting the Pyramids to take ship from Alexandria for Greece.  But men struggle vainly in the meshes of their destiny.  The unbelieved Cassandra was right after all; the plague came, and the necessity of avoiding the quarantine, to which I should have been subjected if I had sailed from Alexandria, forced me to alter my route.  I went down into Egypt, and stayed there for a time, and then crossed the desert once more, and came back to the mountains of the Lebanon, exactly as the prophetess had foretold.

Lady Hester talked to me long and earnestly on the subject of religion, announcing that the Messiah was yet to come.  She strived to impress me with the vanity and the falseness of all European creeds, as well as with a sense of her own spiritual greatness:  throughout her conversation upon these high topics she carefully insinuated, without actually asserting, her heavenly rank.

Amongst other much more marvellous powers, the lady claimed to have one which most women, I fancy, possess namely, that of reading men’s characters in their faces.  She examined the line of my features very attentively, and told me the result, which, however, I mean to keep hidden.

One favoured subject of discourse was that of “race,” upon which she was very diffuse, and yet rather mysterious.  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.