"Following closely upon the heels of Mr. Barnum, Madame Lola Montez, parenthetically putting forth her more aristocratic title of Countess of Landsfeld, commenced on Thursday evening [7th April 1859] the first of a series of lectures at the St. James's Hall. Revisiting this country, she has first felt her footing as a lecturer in the provinces, and now venturing upon the ordeal of a London audience, she has boldly added her name to the list of those who have sought, single-handed, to engage their attention. If any amongst the full and fashionable auditory that attended her first appearance fancied, with a lively recollection of certain scandalous chronicles, that they were about to behold a formidable-looking woman of Amazonian audacity, and palpably strong-wristed, as well as strong-minded, their disappointment must have been grievous; greater if they anticipated the legendary bull-dog at her side and the traditionary pistols in her girdle and the horsewhip in her hand. The Lola Montez who made a graceful and impressive obeisance to those who gave her on Thursday night so cordial and encouraging a reception, appeared simply as a good-looking lady in the bloom of womanhood, attired in a plain black dress, with easy, unrestrained manners, and speaking earnestly and distinctly, with the slightest touch of a foreign accent that might belong to any language from Irish to Bavarian. The subject selected by the fair lecturer was the distinction between the English and the American character, which she proceeded to demonstrate by a discourse that must be pronounced decidedly didactic rather than diverting. With most of the characteristics mentioned as illustrative of each country, we presume the majority of her hearers had, in the course of their reading or experience, become already acquainted. That America looked to the future for her greatness, England to the past; that Americans believed in the spittoon as a valuable institution, and speed as the great condition of success in all things--it hardly needed a Lola Montez to come from the West to inform us. The excitable temperament of our transatlantic brethren, their readiness to raise idols and to demolish them, the great liberty of opinion that there prevails, and the little toleration of its expression, were the leading points of a lecture lasting an hour and a quarter, blended with a compliment to the American ladies, a tributary acknowledgment of the virtues of our own, and a digression into American politics as connected with everything. There was no attempt to weave into the subject a few threads of personal interest, no mention of any incident that had happened to her, and no anecdote that might have enlivened the dissertation in any way. The lecture might have been a newspaper article, the first chapter of a book of travels, or the speech of a long-winded American ambassador at a Mansion House dinner. All was exceedingly decorous and diplomatic, slightly gilded here and there with those commonplace laudations that stir a British public into the utterance of patriotic plaudits. A more inoffensive entertainment could hardly be imagined; and when the six sections into which the lady had divided her discourse were exhausted, and her final bow elicited a renewal of the applause that had accompanied her entrance, the impression on the departing visitors must have been that of having spent an hour in company with a well-informed lady who had gone to America, had seen much to admire there, and, coming back, had had over the tea-table the talk of the evening to herself. Whatever the future disquisitions of the Countess of Landsfeld may be, there is little doubt that many will go to hear them for the sake of the peculiar celebrity of the lecturer."