Lady Charlotte's impulsive outcry: "Writing them?" signified her grounds
for alarm.

Happily, Memoirs are not among the silly deeds done in a moment; they
were somewhere ahead and over the hills: a band of brigands rather than a
homely shining mansion, it was true; but distant; and a principal
question shrieked to know whether he was composing them for publication.
She could look forward with a girl's pleasure to the perusal of them in
manuscript, in a woody nook, in a fervour of partizanship, easily
avoiding sight of errors, grammatical or moral. She chafed at the
possible printing and publishing of them. That would be equivalent to an
exhibition of him clean-stripped for a run across London--brilliant in
himself, spotty in the offence. Published Memoirs indicate the end of a
man's activity, and that he acknowledges the end; and at a period of Lord
Ormont's life when the denial of it should thunder. They are his final
chapter, making mummy of the grand figure they wrap in the printed stuff.
They are virtually his apology. Can those knowing Lord Ormont hear him
apologize? But it is a craven apology if we stoop to expound: we are
seen as pleading our case before the public. Call it by any name you
please, and under any attitude, it is that. And set aside the writing:
it may be perfect; the act is the degradation. It is a rousing of
swarms. His friends and the public will see the proudest nobleman of his
day, pleading his case in mangled English, in the headlong of an out-
poured, undrilled, rabble vocabulary, doubling the ridicule by his
imperturbability over the ridicule he excites: he who is no more
ridiculous, cried the partizan sister, conjuring up the scene, not an ace
more ridiculous, than a judge of assize calling himself miserable sinner
on Sunday before the parson, after he has very properly condemned half a
score of weekday miserable sinners to penal servitude or the rope.
Nobody laughs at the judge. Everybody will be laughing at the scornful