GLADSTONE. That is a game, my dear Armitstead, which came to this country nearly eight hundred years ago from the Crusades. Previously it had been in vogue among the nomadic tribes of the Arabian desert for more than a thousand years. Its very name, "backgammon," so English in sound, is but a corruption from the two Arabic words bacca, and gamma (my pronunciation of which stands subject to correction), meaning—if I remember rightly—"the board game." There, away East, lies its origin; its first recorded appearance in Europe was at the Sicilian Court of the Emperor Frederick II; and when the excommunication of Rome fell on him in the year 1283, the game was placed under an interdict, which, during the next four hundred years, was secretly but sedulously disregarded within those impregnably fortified places of learning and piety, to which so much of our Western civilisation is due, the abbeys and other scholastic foundations of the Benedictine order. The book-form, in which the board still conceals itself, stands as a memorial of its secretive preservation upon the shelves of the monastic libraries. I keep my own, with a certain touch of ritualistic observance, between this seventeenth century edition of the works of Roger Bacon and this more modern one, in Latin, of the writings of Thomas Aquinas; both of whom may not improbably have been practitioners of the game.
ARMITSTEAD. Very interesting, very interesting.
(During this recitation Mr. Gladstone has neatly packed away the draughts and the dice, shutting them into their case finally and restoring it to its place upon the bookshelf.)
GLADSTONE. My dear, I have won the rubber.
MRS. G. Have you, my dear? I'm very glad, if Mr. Armitstead does not mind.
ARMITSTEAD. To be beaten by Mr. Gladstone, ma'am, is a liberal education in itself.
MORLEY (to his host). I must say good-night, now, sir.
GLADSTONE. What, my dear Morley, must you be going?
MORLEY. For one of my habits it is almost late—eleven.
ARMITSTEAD. In that case I must be going, too. Can I drop you anywhere,
Morley?