Taking a professional interest in everything connected, however remotely, with the drama (and having more time in which to do it) the Era offered its readers a considered opinion at greater length: If any amongst the full and fashionable auditory that attended her first appearance fancied (with a lively recollection of certain scandalous chronicles in the newspapers touching upon her antecedents) 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 bulldog at her side, and the traditionary pistols in her girdle, and the horse-whip 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.... 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.
To this, the Era reporter naïvely added: "Her foreign accent might belong to any language from Irish to Bavarian."
Lola did not have the field entirely to herself. While she was telling the St. James's Hall public how to improve their appearance at very small cost, a rival practitioner, with a salon in Bond Street, was, in the advertisement columns of the morning papers, announcing her readiness to furnish the necessary requisites at a very high figure. This was a "Madame Rachel," some of whose dupes parted with as much as five hundred guineas, on the understanding that she would make them "Beautiful for ever!"