_Finesse_ (she adds) is a pretty improvement in modern life and modern language. It is something people may do without being hanged, and speak of without being challenged. It is a point just beyond fair skill and just short of downright knavery; but as the medium is ever hard to hit, the very professors of finesse do sometimes deviate into paths that lead to prisons and the galleys, and such is the case of those unhappy heroes. The Speaker of the House of Commons will be grieved to see two illustrious senators chained at the ignoble oar. The King of France has been applied to, but says he does not interpose in private matters. So how it will go with them no one can tell. In the meantime, poor Miss Ashe weeps like the forsaken Ariadne on a foreign shore. The conduct of Edward Wortley in England was noticed by his father, in a letter to Lady Mary, who, replying to it in a letter from Louveres (November 10, 1751), when the Paris scandal was known, says:--‘I will not make any reflections on the conduct of the person you mention; ’tis a subject too melancholy to us both. I am of opinion that tallying at bassette is a certain revenue (even without cheating) to those who can get constant punters and are able to submit to the drudgery of it; but I never knew any one pursue it long and preserve a tolerable reputation.’ Therewith, the mother dismissed further notice of her wayward son to talk of an old woman at the baths of Louveres, who in her hundredth year had recovered sight, teeth, and hair, and who had died ten years later, not of age, but of tumbling down a stone staircase; something like the apocryphal Countess of Desmond:-- Who lived to the age of a hundred and ten, And died of a fall from a cherry-tree then. Even after the son had escaped the galleys, the mother made no references to the circumstance in a letter to her daughter, the Countess of Bute (February 1752), but was full of ‘Peregrine Pickle’ and of the rather lively sayings and doings of Lady Vane.