from her husband for good, and she entered the room absolutely
houseless!' She was not the less 'astonishingly brilliant.' Her
observations were often 'so unexpectedly droll I laughed till I cried.'
Lady Pennon became in consequence one of the stanch supporters of Mrs.
Warwick.

Others were not so easily won. Perry Wilkinson holds a balance when it
goes beyond a question of her wit and beauty. Henry Wilmers puts the
case aside, and takes her as he finds her. His cousin, the clever and
cynical Dorset Wilmers, whose method of conveying his opinions without
stating them was famous, repeats on two occasions when her name appears
in his pages, 'handsome, lively, witty'; and the stressed repetition of
calculated brevity while a fiery scandal was abroad concerning the lady,
implies weighty substance--the reservation of a constable's truncheon,
that could legally have knocked her character down to the pavement. We
have not to ask what he judged. But Dorset Wilmers was a political
opponent of the eminent Peer who yields the second name to the scandal,
and politics in his day flushed the conceptions of men. His short
references to 'that Warwick-Dannisburgh affair' are not verbally
malicious. He gets wind of the terms of Lord Dannisburgh's will and
testament, noting them without comment. The oddness of the instrument
in one respect may have served his turn; we have no grounds for thinking
him malignant. The death of his enemy closes his allusions to Mrs.
Warwick. He was growing ancient, and gout narrowed the circle he whirled
in. Had he known this 'handsome, lively, witty' apparition as a woman
having political and social views of her own, he would not, one fancies,
have been so stingless. Our England exposes a sorry figure in his
Reminiscences. He struck heavily, round and about him, wherever he
moved; he had by nature a tarnishing eye that cast discolouration. His
unadorned harsh substantive statements, excluding the adjectives, give