Pope was her favourite author: his Rape of the Lock her favourite work. She once did me the favour to play over with me (with the cards) his celebrated game of Ombre in that poem; and to explain to me how far it agreed with, and in what points it would be found to differ from, tradrille. Her illustrations were apposite and poignant; and I had the pleasure of sending the substance of them to Mr. Bowles: but I suppose they came too late to be inserted among his ingenious notes upon that author. Quadrille, she has often told me, was her first love; but whist had engaged her maturer esteem. The former, she said, was showy and specious, and likely to allure young persons. The uncertainty and quick shifting of partners--a thing which the constancy of whist abhors;--the dazzling supremacy and regal investiture of Spadille--absurd, as she justly observed, in the pure aristocracy of whist, where his crown and garter give him no proper power above his brother-nobility of the Aces;--the giddy vanity, so taking to the inexperienced, of playing alone:--above all, the overpowering attractions of a _Sans Prendre Vole_,--to the triumph of which there is certainly nothing parallel or approaching, in the contingencies of whist;--all these, she would say, make quadrille a game of captivation to the young and enthusiastic. But whist was the _solider_ game: that was her word. It was a long meal; not, like quadrille, a feast of snatches. One or two rubbers might coextend in duration with an evening. They gave time to form rooted friendships, to cultivate steady enmities. She despised the chance-started, capricious, and ever fluctuating alliances of the other. The skirmishes of quadrille, she would say, reminded her of the petty ephemeral embroilments of the little Italian states, depicted by Machiavel; perpetually changing postures and connexions; bitter foes to-day, sugared darlings to-morrow; kissing and scratching in a breath;--but the wars of whist were comparable to the long, steady, deep-rooted, rational, antipathies of the great French and English nations.