[529. ]Don Félix, who has again lost, speaks with ironic blasphemy. He blames the First Gambler for addressing his prayer to God rather than to the devil.
[546. ]vendellas: for venderlas. In Old Spanish the final r of the infinitive frequently assimilates to the initial l of the enclitic pronoun.
[550. ]Don Félix's perverted sense of honor will not brook the most trivial verbal slight to Elvira on the part of another, although he has cruelly wronged her himself by his deeds.
[558. ]The First Gambler is not sufficiently blasphemous to invoke the devil, and Don Félix does so himself. This invocation changes his luck.
[567. ]Encubierta fatídica figura: one of those threadbare phrases abused by Spain's romantic poets. Valera in his "Del Romanticismo en España y de Espronceda" instances some of these, such as negro capuz, lúgubre són, fúnebre ciprés, etc. Mesonero Romanos in his "Románticos y Romanticismo" ridicules the abuse of the word fatídica. Espronceda was less frequently guilty of this sort of unoriginality than other less gifted poets were.
[610. ]Mentís vos: the usual formula for picking a quarrel.
[625], 631. Que: equivalent to porque.
[653. ]vos: antiquated for vosotros. Don Diego alone is addressed. After Esperad, que may be understood; such omissions of the conjunction are common in poetry. Punctuating differently, we might place a period after Esperad, in which case Cuente might be taken as a first person imperative.
[676. ]juego: such is the reading of the 1840 edition. Some later editor emended to fuego. Though this emendation is plausible, the change seems to me both unnecessary and unhappy. It is characteristic of Don Félix's cool insolence that he should refer to his affair with Elvira as a "game" rather than as a "passion."
[692. ]The Fourth Gambler's remark is somewhat ambiguous, but the sense demands that we take lo as referring to Don Félix. Remember that it was the Fourth Gambler who had resented Don Félix's overbearing conduct. He acted the coward and now talks like a coward. The Third Gambler is the most skeptical regarding changes of luck, because he himself has experienced the greatest ups and downs of fortune in the game just finished.