along with his friend Eliot Warburton, under Bryan Procter, a
Commissioner of Lunacy, better known by his poet-name, Barry
Cornwall; his acquaintance with both husband and wife ripening into
life-long friendship. Mrs. Procter is the "Lady of Bitterness,"
cited in the "Eothen" Preface. As Anne Skepper, before her
marriage, she was much admired by Carlyle; "a brisk witty prettyish
clear eyed sharp tongued young lady"; and was the intimate, among
many, especially of Thackeray and Browning. In epigrammatic power
she resembled Kinglake; but while his acrid sayings were emitted
with gentlest aspect and with softest speech; while, like Byron's
Lambro:


"he was the mildest mannered man
That ever scuttled ship or cut a throat,
With such true breeding of a gentleman,
You never could divine his real thought,"


her sarcasms rang out with a resonant clearness that enforced and
aggravated their severity. That two persons so strongly resembling
each other in capacity for rival exhibition, or for mutual
exasperation, should have maintained so firm a friendship, often
surprised their acquaintance; she explained it by saying that she
and Kinglake sharpened one another like two knives; that, in the
words of Petruchio,


"Where two raging fires meet together,
They do consume the thing that feeds their fury."