Lord Erskine "came to the rescue," and liberated my head.

Lord Carysfort exclaimed, to relieve the awkwardness of the scene,
"_les serpents de l'envie ont sifflés dans son coeur_;" on every side--

"Some did laugh,
And some did say, God bless us,"

--while I, like Macbeth--

"Could not say, Amen."

Meantime Kemble, peevish, as half-tipsy people generally are, and ill
brooking the interference of the two peers, drew back, muttering and
fumbling in his coat-pocket, evidently with some dire intent lowering in
his eyes. To the amusement of all, and to my increased consternation, he
drew forth a volume of the "Wild Irish Girl," (which he had brought to
return to Lady C----k) and, reading, with his deep, emphatic voice, one
of the most high-flown of its passages, he paused, and patting the page
with his forefinger, with the look of Hamlet addressing Polonius, he
said, "Little girl, why did you write such nonsense? And where did you
get all these d--d hard words?"

Thus taken by surprise, and "smarting with my wounds" or mortified
authorship, I answered, unwittingly and witlessly, the truth: "Sir,
I wrote as well as I could, and I got the hard words out of Johnson's
Dictionary."

The eloquence of Erskine himself would have pleaded my cause with less