Her conceit was fairly colossal. The reforms in legislation for Ireland were, in her estimation, owing to her novel of _Florence Macarthy_. She professed to have taught Taglioni the Irish jig: of her toilette, made largely by her own hands, she was comically vain. In _The Fraserians_, a charming off-hand description of the contributors to that magazine, Lady Morgan is depicted trying on a big, showy bonnet before a mirror with a funny mixture of satisfaction and anxiety as to the effect. Chorley, the feared and fearless critic of the _Athenaeum_, speaks of Lady Morgan as one of the most peculiar and original literary characters he ever met. After a long and searching analysis he adds: "However free in speech, she never shocked decorum--never had to be appealed or apologized for as a forlorn woman of genius under difficulties." An American paper, the _Boston Literary Gazette_, gave a personal description which was not sufficiently flattering, and roused the lady's indignant comments. It dared to state that she was "short, with a broad face, blue, inexpressive eyes, and seemed, if such a thing may be named, about forty years of age." Imagine the sensations this paragraph produced! She at once retorted, exclaiming in mock earnest, "I appeal! I appeal to the Titian of his age and country--I appeal to you, Sir Thomas Lawrence. Would you have painted a short, squat, broad-faced, inexpressive, affected, Frenchified, Greenland-seal-like lady of any age? Would any money have tempted you to profane your immortal pencil, consecrated by Nature to the Graces, by devoting its magic to such a model as this described by the Yankee artist of the _Boston Literary_? And yet you did paint the picture of this Lapland Venus--this impersonation of a Dublin Bay codfish!... Alas! no one could have said that I was forty then; and this is the cruelest cut of all! Had it been thirty-nine or fifty! Thirty-nine is still under the mark, and fifty so far beyond it, so hopeless; but forty--the critical age, the Rubicon--I cannot, will not, dwell on it. But, O America! land of my devotion and my idolatry! is it from _you_ the blow has come? Let _Quarterlys_ and _Blackwoods_ libel, but the _Boston Literary_! Et tu Brute!" In 1837 she received a pension of three hundred pounds a year in recognition of her literary merits. In 1839 she published a book entitled _Woman and her Master_, as solid and solemn and dull as if our vivacious friend had put herself into a strait-jacket and swallowed a dose of starch and valerian.