To Mrs. Montagu, Mrs. Vesey (a warm-hearted Irish lady), and Mrs. Ord (daughter of an eminent surgeon, named Dillingham, and subsequently a wealthy widow) is generally ascribed the merit of having founded parties where conversation should form the chief, if not only, occupation. But there was a lady much connected with the above, and, indeed, with all the Blues, to whom may be assigned the honour of first attacking what it was the object of the Bluestockings to overthrow, namely, Miss Mulso, better known to us as Mrs. Chapone,—a name which she acquired by marriage in 1760. When this lady was about twenty-three (1750), she, in concert with Johnson, wrote the tenth number of the _Rambler_. Under the character of Lady Racket, she sent compliments to that censor of manners, and “lets him know she will have cards at her house every Sunday, ... where he will be sure of meeting all the good company in town.... She longs to see the torch of truth produced at an assembly, and to admire the charming lustre it will throw on the jewels, complexions, and behaviour of every dear creature there.” Of course, this note was written as a text to which Johnson might append a comment that should sharply censure that card-playing against which intellectual ladies were beginning to set their faces and close their doors. Accordingly, the _Rambler_ remarks: “At card-tables, however brilliant, I have always thought my visit lost; for I could know nothing of the company but their clothes and their faces. I saw their looks clouded at the beginning of every game, with a uniform solicitude now and then in its progress, varied with a short triumph, at one time wrinkled with cunning; at another, deadened with despondency, or, by accident, flushed with rage at the unskilful or unlucky play of a partner. From such assemblies ... I was quickly forced to retire; they were too trifling for me when I was grave, and too dull when I was cheerful.” When Johnson suggests to Lady Racket to “light up her apartments with myrtle,” he seems to have made the suggestion which ladies of sense and means adopted, and for which they were ridiculed and nicknamed by persons as brainless as any of the figures staring stupidly at nothing on the court cards. There already existed, however, conversation parties that were as little attractive to persons of good taste as the ruinous card-tables were to persons of prudence. In one of the few letters of Mrs. Scott which survived her unfortunate request that all should be destroyed, she thus wrote of card-parties and _conversations_ in the very year, 1750, that Johnson and Miss Mulso combined in the _Rambler_ to reform both: