book.

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