The _Humboldt_ arrived at New York on Friday, 5th December 1851, and was received with a salute of thirty-one guns--in honour, it need hardly be said, of Kossuth, not of the Countess of Landsfeld. She was not altogether overlooked in the transports of enthusiasm and public rejoicings with which the American people hailed the exiled hero. She was promptly interviewed by the newspaper men, who were surprised to find that she was not a masculine woman, but rather slim in her stature.
"She has," continues the report, "a face of great beauty, and a pair of black [_sic_] Spanish eyes, which flash fire when she is speaking, and make her, with the sparkling wit of her conversation, a great favourite in company. She has black hair, which curls in ringlets by the sides of her face, and her nose is of a pure Grecian cast, while her cheek bones are high, and give a Moorish appearance to her face.
"She states that many bad things have been said of her by the American Press, yet she is not the woman she has been represented to be: if she were, her admirers, she believes, would be still more numerous. She expresses herself fearful that she will not be properly considered in New York, but hopes that a discriminating public will judge of her after having seen her, and not before."[24]
New York and its people in the middle of the last century have been portrayed unkindly, but I do not think unfairly, by Charles Dickens. That great novelist visited the country for the first time only seven years before Lola landed, and his impressions are largely embodied in "Martin Chuzzlewit." With the type of American delineated therein, it is evident that the Countess of Landsfeld knew exactly how to deal. She succeeded at once in disarming an intensely puritanical people by enthusiastic appeals to their childlike national vanity, by delighted acquiescence in their laughable self-righteousness. Colonel Diver and General Choke could with difficulty have bettered her allusion to their Great Country as "this stupendous asylum of the world's unfortunates, and last refuge of the victims of the tyranny and wrongs of the Old World! God grant," devoutly prays the Countess, "that it may ever stand as it is now, the noblest column of liberty that was ever reared beneath the arch of heaven!" At the conclusion of her autobiography the American people are told that the pilgrim from the effete forms of Europe must look upon their great Republic with as happy an eye as the storm-tossed and shipwrecked mariner looks upon the first star that shines beneath the receding tempest. These words, indeed, are Mr. Chauncy Burr's, but the sentiments beyond doubt are those that Lola constantly affected. Her mastery over men, as is always the case, was due not so much to her physical charms as to her skill in detecting their weakest sides. It says much for her shrewdness that she who had hitherto found it safest to appeal to men through their passions, perceived that the cold Yankee was most vulnerable through so artificial and dispassionate a sentiment as patriotism. Every other woman of her experience would have assumed that the animal predominated in all men, of whatever race or country.