Oh that mine enemy always would! for, I regret to say, some short time ago, a miscreant—one of the soundest Whist-players in this country—took up the four, five and six of diamonds (trumps); ace, knave, ten, eight, four and three of hearts; king, six and four of spades; and the eight of clubs, which he led. His score was one, ours four. I was second player, and held, inter alia, ace, queen, seven and six of clubs; and king, ten, eight, seven and five of trumps; my partner held king, knave, five and four of clubs, and though he turned up the queen of trumps, we lost four by cards and the game.
Now this is a man who reads his newspaper, and should, in common decency, have led the ace and four of hearts. Somewhat nettled by the success of his nefarious play, I said to him, “even if you have not seen the Fruits of Philosophy, you must know better than to lead a singleton,” and this was his ribald reply:—
How sad and mad and bad it was,
But still how it was sweet.
To return to my subject. If any one were to ask me when not to lead trumps with five, I should reply, “My very dear sir, it is not in my power to provide you with intelligence, the stock in my possession is barely sufficient for my own use; with five trumps, you should lead them nearly always, especially when you are very weak in the plain suits; but if, after acquiring a fair knowledge of general principles, you are unable to find out for yourself when it is inexpedient to lead them, I am quite sure nobody can teach you, and you may depend upon this, that a multitude of minute rules, purporting to explain to you when you should not do that which you would be right in doing ninety-fives times in a hundred, are a mockery, a delusion, and a snare.
“Lay to heart the story of that little fish, which desired to know all the mysteries of fishing-tackle, and when its prayer was granted, was unable to assimilate its knowledge, and perished miserably from inanition. At the same time, if, after what I have said, you should feel disposed to commit those two articles to memory, and to repeat them to yourself whenever a difficulty arises, there is nothing in the laws of Whist to prevent you.”
It is sad to reflect that such an incomparable talent for applying a straight-waistcoat to every thing should have blundered into a wrong groove; a tithe of the energy and perseverance devoted to throttling intelligence, and knocking the brains out of the game, would have placed our villainous code of laws, and our incongruous and contradictory decisions on a sound basis; but it was not to be; dis aliter visum, and the following pathetic appeal, reprinted from “Knowledge,” has been treated with silent contempt:—
A WHIST-PLAYER’S WAIL.
Whist-players have long been suffering acutely from three uncertainties—uncertainty of the laws, uncertainty of decisions, and uncertainty of authority.
The laws are ninety-one in number, and, in “Cavendish on Whist,” are supplemented by forty-three explanatory notes and a couple of suppositions, which again have been further explained—if explain is the right word in this connection—by innumerable irresponsible decisions. Now, though it may be Utopian to expect such a badly-worded jumble of laws and definitions ever to be superseded by an intelligible code, is it impossible to have these decisions based on a principle of some kind, or, at any rate, for them to be consistent with themselves?