She writes from her home on the Upper Nile:  ’In this country one gets to see how much more beautiful a perfectly natural expression is than any degree of the mystical expression of the best painters.’  It is by her banishing of literary colouring matter that she brings the Arab and Copt home to us as none other has done, by her unlaboured pleading that she touches to the heart.  She was not one to ’spread gold-leaf over her acquaintances and make them shine,’ as Horace Walpole says of Madame de Sevigne; they would have been set shining from within, perhaps with a mild lustre; sensibly to the observant, more credibly of the golden sort.  Her dislike of superlatives, when the marked effect had to be produced, and it was not the literary performance she could relish as well as any of us, renders hard the task of portraying a woman whose character calls them forth.  To him knowing her, they would not fit; her individuality passes between epithets.  The reading of a sentence of panegyric (commonly a thing of extension) deadened her countenance, if it failed to quicken the corners of her lips; the distended truth in it exhibited the comic shadow on the wall behind.  That haunting demon of human eulogy is quashed by the manner she adopted, from instinct and training.  Of her it was known to all intimate with her that she could not speak falsely in praise, nor unkindly in depreciation, however much the constant play of her humour might tempt her to exalt or diminish beyond the bounds.  But when, for the dispersion of nonsense about men or things, and daintiness held up the veil against rational eyesight, the gros mot was demanded, she could utter it, as from the Bench, with a like authority and composure.

In her youth she was radiantly beautiful, with dark brows on a brilliant complexion, the head of a Roman man, and features of Grecian line, save for the classic Greek wall of the nose off the forehead.  Women, not enthusiasts, inclined rather to criticize, and to criticize so independent a member of their sex particularly, have said that her entry into a ballroom took the breath.  Poetical comparisons run under heavy weights in prose; but it would seem in truth, from the reports of her, that wherever she appeared she could be likened to a Selene breaking through cloud; and, further, the splendid vessel was richly freighted.  Trained by a scholar, much in the society of scholarly men, having an innate bent to exactitude, and with a ready tongue docile to the curb, she stepped into the world armed to be a match for it.  She cut her way through the accustomed troops of adorers, like what you will that is buoyant and swims gallantly.  Her quality of the philosophical humour carried her easily over the shoals or the deeps in the way of a woman claiming her right to an independent judgement upon the minor rules of conduct, as well as upon matters of the mind.  An illustrious foreigner, en tete-a-tete with her over some abstract theme,