her sarcasms rang out with a resonant clearness that enforced and aggravated their severity. That two persons so strongly resembling each other in capacity for rival exhibition, or for mutual exasperation, should have maintained so firm a friendship, often surprised their acquaintance; she explained it by saying that she and Kinglake sharpened one another like two knives; that, in the words of Petruchio, “Where two raging fires meet together, They do consume the thing that feeds their fury.” [Picture: Eliot Warburton. From a water-colour drawing in the possession of Canon Warburton] Crabb Robinson, stung by her in a tender place, his boastful iterative monologues on Weimar and on Goethe, said that of all men Procter ought to escape purgatory after death, having tasted its fulness here through living so many years with Mrs. Procter; “the husbands of the talkative have great reward hereafter,” said Rudyard Kipling’s Lama. And I have been told by those who knew the pair that there was truth as well as irritation in the taunt. “A graceful Preface to ‘Eothen,’” wrote to me a now famous lady who as a girl had known Mrs. Procter well, “made friendly company yesterday to a lonely meal, and brought back memories of Mr. Kinglake’s kind spoiling of a raw young woman, and of the wit, the egregious vanity, the coarseness, the kindness, of that hard old worldling our Lady of Bitterness.” In the presence of one man, Tennyson, she laid aside her shrewishness: “talking with Alfred Tennyson lifts me out of the earth earthy; a visit to Farringford is like a retreat to the religious.” A celebrity in London for fifty years, she died, witty and vigorous to the last, in 1888. “You and I and Mr. Kinglake,” she says to Lord Houghton, “are all that are left of the goodly band that used to come to St. John’s Wood; Eliot Warburton, Motley, Adelaide, Count de Verg, Chorley, Sir Edwin Landseer, my husband.” “I never could write a book,” she tells him in another letter, “and one strong reason for not doing so was the idea of some few seeing how poor it was. Venables was one of the few; I need not say that you were one, and Kinglake.” Kinglake was called to the Chancery Bar, and practised apparently with no great success. He believed that his reputation as a writer stood in his way. When, in 1845, poor Hood’s friends were helping him by gratuitous articles in his magazine, “Hood’s Own,” Kinglake wrote to Monckton Milnes refusing to contribute. He will send £10 to buy an article from some competent writer, but will not himself write. “It would be seriously injurious to me if the author of ‘Eothen’ were _affichéd_ as contributing to a magazine. My frailty in publishing a book has, I fear, already hurt me in my profession, and a small sin of this kind would bring on me still deeper disgrace with the solicitors.”