The lady in question undoubtedly held a very high station in the best society of Paris; and at that time, and in that country, it is certain that such attachments, if permanent and decorous, and in a very high class of society, acquired a more than tolerated respectability. In 1769, Madame de Boufflers speaks of her attachment as one of twenty years' duration. Early in life, and soon after her marriage, she had been placed at the court of the Duchess of Orleans: but quarrelling with that princess, she came under the protection of the Prince of Conti. Of course, her correspondence bears no mark of her having been subjected to slights, or of her dreading them; or indeed of any suspicion that there was any thing in her position to prevent her from being rigid in her ideas of virtue, and a teacher of social duties. On her visit to England, she was well received by the British aristocracy, and was even honoured by a laudatory growl from Johnson. We find her exchanging visits with the Marchioness of Hertford, the wife of the English ambassador, one of the purest of that portion of the English female aristocracy which had not suffered taint. In one of her letters to Hume, she describes the death-bed of the prince's mother; speaks of her displaying the heroism of a grand-daughter of the great Condé; and talks with tearful gratitude of the early kindness of that princess to herself, and of her attempts to pay the debt by solacing her old age, and performing to her the last duties which the living receive from each other. It is in all its spirit the letter of a daughter-in-law. The prince, though a generous and kind-hearted man, could not be prevailed on to make her his wife on her husband's death; but when he died in 1776, he had raised no princess over her head. We shall find that she made Hume the confidant in her griefs and disappointments, and the adviser in her difficulties. There is a great air of earnestness and solicitude in these appeals; and though we cannot help presuming, that a woman so full in her disclosures to a foreigner, living among a people of totally different habits and morals, must have distributed a still larger portion of her confidential revelations nearer home; yet it is evident that she had much reliance on Hume's counsel, and perhaps he was not ill fitted for a father-confessor to such a penitent.