In one respect it more resembled an episcopal than a trading city. The four kings and their respective suits of red and black were not upon more frequent service in the precincts of a cathedral, than in the good town of Doncaster. A stranger who had been invited to spend the evening with a family there, to which he had been introduced, was asked by the master of the house to take a card as a matter of course; upon his replying that he did not play at cards, the company looked at him with astonishment, and his host exclaimed—“What, Sir! not play at cards? the Lord help you!”
I will not say the Lord helped Daniel Dove, because there would be an air of irreverence in the expression, the case being one in which he, or any one, might help himself. He knew enough of all the games which were then in vogue to have played at them, if he had so thought good; and he would have been as willing, sometimes, in certain moods of mind, to have taken his seat at a card-table, in houses where card-playing did not form part of the regular business of life, as to have listened to a tune on the old-fashioned spinnet, or the then new-fashioned harpsichord. But that which as an occasional pastime he might have thought harmless and even wholesome, seemed to him something worse than folly when it was made a kill-time,—the serious occupation for which people were brought together,—the only one at which some of them ever appeared to give themselves the trouble of thinking. And seeing its effects upon the temper, and how nearly this habit was connected with a spirit of gambling, he thought that cards had not without reason been called the Devil's Books.
I shall not therefore introduce the reader to a Doncaster card-party, by way of shewing him the society of the place. The Mrs. Shuffles, Mrs. Cuts and Miss Dealems, the Mr. Tittles and Mrs. Tattles, the Humdrums and the Prateapaces, the Fribbles and the Feebles, the Perts and the Prims, the Littlewits and the Longtongues, the Heavyheads and the Broadbelows, are to be found everywhere.
“It is quite right,” says one of the Guessers at Truth, “that there should be a heavy duty on cards: not only on moral grounds; not only because they act on a social party like a torpedo, silencing the merry voice and numbing the play of the features; not only to still the hunger of the public purse, which reversing the qualities of Fortunatus's, is always empty, however much you may put into it; but also because every pack of cards is a malicious libel on courts, and on the world, seeing that the trumpery with number one at the head, is the best part of them; and that it gives kings and queens no other companions than knaves.”
CHAPTER LXVI.
MR. COPLEY OF NETHERHALL. SOCIETY AT HIS HOUSE. DRUMMOND. BURGH. GRAY. MASON. MILLER THE ORGANIST AND HISTORIAN OF DONCASTER. HERSCHEL.
All worldly joys go less
To the one joy of doing kindnesses.
HERBERT.