The incident was entirely characteristic of her.  She was furiously angry with all things in heaven above and on the earth below because she was at the moment inconvenienced.

Here is the beginning of a letter from her of a date some months anterior to the Boboli adventure: 

“Illustrissimo Signor Tommaso” (that was the usual style of her address to me), “as your book is just out you must feel quite en train for puffs of any description.  Therefore I send you the best I have seen for a long while, La Physiologie du Fumeur.  But even if you don’t like it, don’t put it in your pipe and smoke it. Vide Joseph Fume.”

A little subsequently she writes:  “Signor Tommaso, the only revenge I shall take for your lecture” (probably on the matter of some outrageous extravagance) “is not to call you illustrissimo and not to send you an illuminated postillion” (a previous letter having been ornamented with such a decoration at the top of the sheet), “but let you find your way to Venice in the dark as you can, and then and there, ‘On the Rialto I will rate you,’ and, being a man, you know there is no chance of my over-rating you.”

The following passage from the same letter refers to some negotiations with which she had entrusted me relative to some illustrations she was bent on having in a forthcoming book she was about to publish:—­“As for the immortal Cruikshank, tell him that I am sure the mighty genius which conceived Lord Bateman could not refuse to give any lady the werry best, and if he does I shall pass the rest of my life registering a similar wow to that of the fair Sophia, and exclaiming, ‘I vish, George Cruikshank, as you vas mine.’”

The rest of the long, closely-written four-paged letter is an indiscriminate and bitter, though joking attack, upon the race of publishers.  She calls Mr. Colburn an “embodied shiver,” which will bring a smile to the lips of those—­few, I fear—­who remember the little man.

Here are some extracts from a still longer letter written to my mother much about the same time:  “I hear Lady S——­ has committed another novel, called The Three Peers, no doubt l’un pire que l’autre!...  I have a great many kind messages to you from that very charming person Madame Recamier, who fully intends meeting you at Venice with Chateaubriand in October, for so she told me on Sunday.  I met her at Miss Clarke’s some time ago, and as I am a bad pusher I am happy to say she asked to be introduced to me, and was, thanks to you, my kind friend!  She pressed me to go and see her, which I have done two or three times, and am going to do again at her amiable request on Thursday.  I think that her fault is that she flatters a little too much.  And flattery to one whose ears have so long been excoriated by abuse does not sound safe.  However, all is right when she speaks of you.  And the point she most eulogised