A repulsive and unfounded couplet. Judges never sign sentences, and if a juryman is in haste to dine it is at least as easy to acquit as to condemn.—Croker.
[424] Dryden's Æn. vii. 170:
And the long labours of your voyage end.—Wakefield.
Owing to the change of fashion the particulars in the text no longer serve to mark the time of the day. From Swift's Journal of a Modern Lady, written in 1728, we learn that the fashionable dinner-hour, when "the long labours of the toilet ceased," was four o'clock. Cards were reserved for after tea; but the holiday-makers, who in the Rape of the Lock, go by water to Hampton Court, are represented as playing from the usual dinner-hour till coffee is brought in, which may have been a common arrangement in these pleasure-parties.
[425] All that follows of the game at ombre, was added since the first edition, till ver. 105, which connected thus,
Sudden the board with cups and spoons is crowned.—Pope.
[426] Ombre was invented in Spain, and owed its name to the phrase which was to be used by the person who undertook to stand the game,—"Yo soy l'hombre, I am the man." In the Rape of the Lock Belinda was the ombre, and hence she is described as encountering singly her two antagonists.
[427] The game could be played with two, three, or five; but three was the usual number, and nine cards were dealt to each.
[428] From the Spanish matador, a murderer, because the matadors in ombre were the three best cards, and the slayers of all that came into competition with them.
[429] Knave was the old term for a servant, and Wakefield remarks that they are represented "in garbs succinct," because, among the ancients, domestics, when at work, had their flowing robes gathered up to the girdle about the waist.