does this) the best daughter, wife, and mother in the world; nay, you may make her a heroine; but nothing can make her a genuine woman of fashion! And yet this latter rôle is the one which, par preference, she always wishes to act. Thorough-bred English gentlewomen," said Byron, "are the most distinguished and lady-like creatures imaginable. Natural, mild, and dignified, they are formed to be placed at the heads of our patrician establishments; but when they quit their congenial spheres to enact the leaders of fashion, les dames à la mode, they bungle sadly; their gaiety degenerates into levity - their hauteur into incivility - their fashionable ease and nonchalance into brusquerie - and their attempts at assuming les usages du monde into a positive outrage on all the bienséances. In short, they offer a coarse caricature of the airy flightiness and capricious, but amusing, légèreté of the French, without any of their redeeming espièglerie and politesse. And all this because they will perform parts in the comedy of life for which nature has not formed them, neglecting their own dignified characters."
"Madame de Staël," continued Lord Byron, "was forcibly struck by the factitious tone of the best society in London, and wished very much to have an opportunity of judging of that of the
