[18] Queen Elizabeth received her graciously at court, and offered to create her a Countess.--See _Notes_ v. III.
"Nay, nay, nurse," said Lady Adelaide, "be not so flippant in thy praise, else I shall grow positively jealous. I therefore must stop you just now, for it seems your tongue runs riot quite with your discretion; and has bounced off at a tangent in full gallop, jumping pell-mell, hop and step, from the young and lovely Anne O'Malley to grey-head old Grana Uile, (of neither of whom, by the bye, did I speak,) until in most crab-like motion you pounce upon the majestic Elizabeth; and all this in most manifest and notable contempt of time, place, and circumstance. This really is not to be endured. Besides, I pray you to remember, that _once_, however, _there was a time_ when no one was so handsome, so good, and all so angelic and so forth, as _your own Adelaide_! And, in undisguised truth, I was in a very fair and hopeful way of being utterly spoiled, but that happily I turned a deaf and obdurate ear to all your too partial praise, as well I knew that your commendations all sprung from overweening kindness. However, just now I am happy to find that you are converted from your former heresies, and that at length you behold your poor idol in its mortal shape, imbued with all its natural and perverse imperfections; and that you are now free to confess that, in sooth, I am not, as I never was, that angel of excellence, and that paragon of beauty, which your early devotions conceived me to be. You have broken your idol, and it has fallen from the pedestal upon which you had proudly placed it, shivered into atoms on the earth!"
This Lady Adelaide said in a playful way, half pretendedly serious, and the other half wholly comic.
"Ah, my dear young Lady! and so you are still the idol of goodness, and the very dragon of beauty! none who ever saw you, who ever knew you, can think otherwise; this I ever thought you were; and I defy Guy of Warwig, the seven Champions of Chrysostom, and Saint Patrick himself, to boot, to deny it if they durst, but that you are the best, the brightest, and finest young lady in the 'varsal world; and I challenge ould England and ould Ireland to gainsay me!