And upon that, suddenly comes a cyclonic gust; and gossip twirls, whines, and falls to the twanging of an entirely new set of notes, that furnish a tolerably agreeable tune, on the whole.  O hear!  The Marchioness of Arpington proclaims not merely acquaintanceship with Lord Fleetwood’s countess, she professes esteem for the young person.  She has been heard to say, that if the Principality of Wales were not a royal title, a dignity of the kind would be conferred by the people of those mountains on the Countess of Fleetwood:  such unbounded enthusiasm there was for her character when she sojourned down there.  As it is, they do speak of her in their Welsh by some title.  Their bards are offered prizes to celebrate her deeds.  You remember the regiment of mounted Welsh gentlemen escorting her to her Kentish seat, with their band of the three-stringed harps!  She is well-born, educated, handsome, a perfectly honest woman, and a sound Protestant.  Quite the reverse of Lord Fleetwood’s seeking to escape her, it is she who flies; she cannot forgive him his cruelties and infidelities:  and that is the reason why he threatens to commit the act of despair.  Only she can save him!  She has flown for refuge to her uncle, Lord Levellier’s house at a place named Croridge—­not in the gazetteer—­hard of access and a home of poachers, where shooting goes on hourly; but most picturesque and romantic, as she herself is!  Lady Arpington found her there, nursing one of the wounded, and her uncle on his death-bed; obdurate all round against her husband, but pensive when supplicated to consider her country endangered by Rome.  She is a fervent patriot.  The tales of her Whitechapel origin, and heading mobs wielding bludgeons, are absolutely false, traceable to scandalizing anecdotists like Mr. Rose Mackrell.  She is the beautiful example of an injured wife doing honour to her sex in the punishment of a faithless husband, yet so little cherishing her natural right to deal him retribution, that we dare hope she will listen to her patriotic duty in consenting to the reconcilement, which is Lord Fleetwood’s alternative:  his wife or Rome!  They say she has an incommunicable charm, accounting for the price he puts on her now she holds aloof and he misses it.  Let her but rescue him from England’s most vigilant of her deadly enemies, she will be entitled to the nation’s lasting gratitude.  She has her opportunity for winning the Anglican English, as formerly she won the Dissenter Welsh.  She may yet be the means of leading back the latter to our fold.

A notation of the cries in air at a time of surgent public excitement can hardly yield us music; and the wording of them, by the aid of compounds and transplants, metaphors and similes only just within range of the arrows of Phoebus’ bow (i.e. the farthest flight known), would, while it might imitate the latent poetry, expose venturesome writers to the wrath of a people commendably believing their language a perfected instrument