its latest inspiriting jig.

And she will not have the consequences of the 'weariful old Irish duel
between Honour and Hunger judged by bread and butter juries.'

She had need to be beautiful to be tolerable in days when Englishmen
stood more openly for the strong arm to maintain the Union. Her troop
of enemies was of her summoning.

Ordinarily her topics were of wider range, and those of a woman who mixed
hearing with reading, and observation with her musings. She has no
doleful ejaculatory notes, of the kind peculiar to women at war,
containing one-third of speculative substance to two of sentimental--
a feminine plea for comprehension and a squire; and it was probably the
reason (as there is no reason to suppose an emotional cause) why she
exercised her evident sway over the mind of so plain and straightforward
an Englishman as Henry Wilmers. She told him that she read rapidly, 'a
great deal at one gulp,' and thought in flashes--a way with the makers of
phrases. She wrote, she confessed, laboriously. The desire to prune,
compress, overcharge, was a torment to the nervous woman writing under a
sharp necessity for payment. Her songs were shot off on the impulsion;
prose was the heavy task. 'To be pointedly rational,' she said, 'is a
greater difficulty for me than a fine delirium.' She did not talk as if
it would have been so, he remarks. One is not astonished at her
appearing an 'actress' to the flat-minded. But the basis of her woman's
nature was pointed flame: In the fulness of her history we perceive
nothing histrionic. Capricious or enthusiastic in her youth, she never
trifled with feeling; and if she did so with some showy phrases and
occasionally proffered commonplaces in gilt, as she was much excited to
do, her moods of reflection were direct, always large and honest,