Further, Finch’s face reveals vanity, and Baines’s letters a turn for flattery--gross and inflated beyond even a seventeenth-century measure. Thomas, clearly, had established over John an ascendancy by accustoming him to lean upon his strength and to feed upon his praises. There is also evidence to show that Thomas was not the man to relax his hold: to surrender or share a domination which interest and sentiment alike made precious to him. In 1661 Finch met in Warwickshire a young lady who had the good fortune to please him. The moment Baines got wind of this matrimonial project, he set vigorously to work to defeat it. He used many arguments of a prudential nature, but the one that clinched the matter was this: Suppose you have children, then you die, and she marries again, how can you be sure that she will not dispose of her estate to her second husband and his progeny?[51] The logic of Thomas triumphed over what John called his love, and he never again caused his friend any uneasiness upon that score. Thenceforward his whole life was annexed and welded to the life of Baines in a degree which, perhaps, has no counterpart in authentic history. As to Baines, he does not seem to have ever loved anybody except Finch and himself. Needless to say, Sir Thomas did his best to solace Sir John for the loneliness which is the penalty of greatness. That he was a cheerful companion it would be absurd to imagine: he was just as cheerful as could be expected from one who often lay, as he himself tells us, “under the torment of gout and stone both in bladder and rheyns”[52]--common distempers of the times. Not that Finch enjoyed wild spirits either. Both were of a studious and sedentary disposition, and their long residence in Italy had confirmed their constitutional languor: so much so that their friends in England had found the ways of these “Italians,” as they nicknamed them, a little hard to understand. As a consequence, they both indulged rather freely in exercises of a theologico-philosophical character and in the pleasures of the table. For the rest, their recreations appear to have been of a strictly conventual innocence. Let us intrude for an instant upon their domestic privacy. It is the beginning of summer, 1674, and Sir Thomas is seated at his escritoire, writing to Lord Conway. After enumerating “my Lord Ambassadour’s” multitudinous achievements, he descends to matters of a less exalted and more pleasing nature. His very style loses much of its rhetorical affectation as he writes: