Page:Eothen, or, Traces of travel brought home from the East by Kinglake, Alexander William.djvu/93

 Religion, announcing that the Messiah was yet to come: she strived to impress me with the vanity and the falseness of all European creeds, as well as with a sense of her own spiritual greatness: throughout her conversation upon these high topics, she skilfully insinuated, without actually asserting, her heavenly rank.

Amongst other much more marvellous powers, the Lady claimed to have one which most women I fancy possess, namely, that of reading men's characters in their faces; she examined the line of my features very attentively, and told me the result, which, however, I mean to keep hidden.

One great subject of discourse was that of "race," upon which she was very diffuse, and yet rather mysterious; she set great value upon the ancient French (not Norman blood, for that she vilified), but did not at all appreciate that which we call in this country an "old family." She had a vast idea of the Cornish miners on account of their race, and said, if she chose, she could give me the means of rousing them to the most tremendous enthusiasm.

Such are the topics on which the Lady mainly conversed, but very often she would descend to more worldly chat, and then she was no longer the prophetess, but the sort of woman that you sometimes see, I am told, in London drawing-rooms,—cool—unsparing of enemies—full of audacious fun, and saying the downright things that the sheepish society around her is afraid to utter. I am told that Lady Hester was in her youth a capital mimic, and she showed me that not all the queenly dullness to which she had condemned herself,—not all her fasting, and solitude, had destroyed this terrible power. The first whom she crucified in my presence, was poor Lord Byron; she had seen him, it appeared, I know not where, soon after his arrival in the East, and was vastly amused at his little affectations; he had picked up a few sentences of the Romaic, with which he affected to give orders to his Greek servant; I can't tell whether