To save the story from having its vein tied, we may accept the reminder, that he was the countess’s voluble advocate at a period when her friends were shy to speak of her.  After relating the Vauxhall Gardens episode in burlesque Homeric during the freshness of the scandal, Rose Mackrell’s enthusiasm for the heroine of his humour set in.  He tracked her to her parentage, which was new breath blown into the sunken tradition of some Old Buccaneer and his Countess Fanny:  and, a turn of great good luck helping him to a copy of the book of the maxims for men, he would quote certain of the racier ones, passages of Captain John Peter Kirby’s personal adveres in various lands and waters illustrating the text, to prove that the old warrior acted by the rule of his recommendations.  They had the repulsive attraction proper to rusty lumber swords and truncehons that have tasted brains.  They wove no mild sort of halo for the head of a shillelagh-flourishing Whitechapel Countess descended from the writer and doer.

People were willing to believe in her jump of thirty feet or more off a suburban house-top to escape durance, and her midnight storming of her lord’s town house, and ousting of him to go find his quarters at Scrope’s hotel.  He, too, had his band of pugilists, as it was known; and he might have heightened a rageing scandal.  The nobleman forbore.  A woman’s blow gracefully taken adds a score of inches to our stature, floor us as it may:  we win the world’s after-thoughts.  Rose Mackrell sketched the earl;—­always alert, smart, quick to meet a combination and protect a dignity never obtruded, and in spite of himself the laugh of the town.  His humour flickered wildly round the ridiculous position of a prominent young nobleman, whose bearing and character were foreign to a position of ridicule.

Nevertheless, the earl’s figure continuing to be classic sculpture, it allied him with the aristocracy of martyrs, that burn and do not wince.  He propitiated none, and as he could not but suffer shrewdly, he gained esteem enough to shine through the woman’s pitiless drenching of him.  During his term at Scrope’s hotel, the carousals there were quite old-century and matter of discourse.  He had proved his return to sound sense in the dismissal of ‘the fiddler,’ notoriously the woman’s lieutenant, or more; and nightly the revelry closed at the great gaming tables of St. James’s Street, while Whitechapel held the coroneted square, well on her way to the Law courts, as Abrane and Potts reported; and positively so, ‘clear case.’  That was the coming development and finale of the Marriage.  London waited for it.