“Talking over the hand after it has been played is not uncommonly called a bad habit and an annoyance, I am firmly persuaded it is one of the readiest ways of learning whist.”—Clay.
“O dreary life!” we cry, “O dreary life!”
And still the generation of the birds
Sing through our sighing, and the flocks and herds
Serenely live while we are keeping strife.
“The education of the whist-player is peculiar. How he becomes a whist-player nobody knows. He never learns his alphabet or the catechism or anything that he ought to do. He appears full-grown, mushroom-like. He remembers someone blowing him up for doing something he ought not to have done, and somebody else blowing him up for doing something else, and he is blown up to the end of the chapter. This phase of being blown up is varied by grumbling sometimes aloud, sometimes sotto voce; so that the whist-player is reared on scolding and grumbling as other youngsters are reared on pap. Truly this is a happy life. Some men grumble on principle because it is a national privilege, and they avail themselves of the Englishman’s birthright.”
“A sect whose chief devotion lies
In odd perverse antipathies:
In falling out with that or this,