Our greatest miracle is Lady Mary Wortley’s son, whose adventures have made so much noise; his parts are not proportionate, but his expense is incredible. His father scarce allows him anything; yet he plays, dresses, diamonds himself, even to distinct shoe-buckles for a frock, and has more snuff-boxes than would suffice a Chinese idol with a hundred noses. But the most curious part of his dress, which he has brought from Paris, is an iron wig; you literally would not know it from hair; I believe it is on this account that the Royal Society have just chosen him of their body. His father, however, made no complaint of his son in his letters to his wife. The anxious mother invariably concluded that when nothing was said there was something to be dreaded. Accordingly, in a letter to her husband, dated May 1751, Lady Mary writes: (May 24, 1751.) ‘I can no longer resist the desire I have to know what is become of my son. I have long suppressed it, from a belief that, if there was anything good to be told, you would not fail to give me the pleasure of hearing it. I find it now grows so much upon me, that whatever I am to know, I think it would be easier for me to support than the anxiety I suffer from my doubts. I beg to be informed, and prepare myself for the worst with all the philosophy I have.’ Her son was not in such a desperate condition as his mother supposed. The new Fellow of the Royal Society was simply making love to ‘the Pollard Ashe.’ In the summer of this year, 1751, Vauxhall and the Mall missed her; but the world knew very well whither she had wended, and with whom. In September 1751 Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu wrote to her husband: ‘Young Wortley is gone to France with Miss Ashe. He is certainly a gentleman of infinite vivacity; but methinks he might as well have deferred this exploit till the death of his father.’ Walpole wrote to Mann that ‘Wortley, who, you know, has been a perfect Gil Blas, is thought to have added the famous Miss Ashe to the number of his wives.’