Time as he passes us, has a dove's wing,
Unsoil'd, and swift, and of a silken sound;
But the World's Time, is Time in masquerade!
Their's, should I paint him, has his pinions fledged,
With motley plumes; and where the peacock shews
His azure eyes, is tinctured black and red
With spots quadrangular of diamond form,
Ensanguined hearts, clubs typical of strife,
And spades, the emblem of untimely graves.
COWPER.
Hunting, gaming and dancing are three propensities to which men are inclined equally in the savage and in the civilized,—in all stages of society from the rudest to the most refined, and in all its grades; the Doctor used to say they might be called semi-intellectual. The uses of hunting are obvious wherever there are wild animals which may be killed for food, or beasts of prey which for our own security it is expedient to destroy.
Indeed because hunting, hawking and fishing (all which according to Gwillim and Plato are comprised in the term Venation) tend to the providing of sustenance for man, Farnesius doth therefore account them all a species of agriculture. The great heraldic author approves of this comprehensive classification. But because the more heroic hunting in which danger is incurred from the strength and ferocity of the animals pursued, hath a resemblance of military practice, he delivers his opinion that “this noble kind of venation is privileged from the title of an Illiberal Art, being a princely and generous exercise; and those only, who use it for a trade of life, to make sure thereof, are to be marshalled in the rank of mechanics and illiberal artizans.” The Doctor admired the refinement of these authors, but he thought that neither lawful sporting, nor poaching could conveniently be denominated agricultural pursuits.
He found it not so easy to connect the love of gaming with any beneficial effect; some kind of mental emotion however, he argued, was required for rendering life bearable by creatures with whom sleep is not so compleatly an act of volition, that like dogs they can lie down and fall asleep when they like. For those persons therefore who are disposed either by education, capacity, or inclination to make any worthier exertion of their intellectual faculties, gaming, though infinitely dangerous as a passion, may be useful as a pastime. It has indeed a strong tendency to assume a dangerous type, and to induce as furious an excitement as drunkenness in its most ferocious form, but among the great card-playing public of all nations, long experience has produced an effect in mitigating it analogous to what the practice of inoculation has effected upon the small-pox. Vaccination would have afforded our philosopher a better illustration if it had been brought into notice during his life.
Pope has assigned to those women who neither toil or spin, “an old age of cards,” after “a youth of pleasure.” This perhaps is not now so generally the course of female life, in a certain class and under certain circumstances, as it was in his days and in the Doctor's. The Doctor, certainly was of opinion that if the senescent spinsters and dowagers within the circle of his little world, had not their cards as duly as their food, many of them would have taken to something worse in their stead. They would have sought for the excitement which they now found at the whist or quadrille table, from the bottle, or at the Methodist Meeting. In some way or other, spiritual or spirituous they must have had it;1 and the more scandalous of these ways was not always that which would occasion the greatest domestic discomfort, or lead to the most injurious consequences. Others would have applied to him for relief from maladies which by whatever names they might be called, were neither more nor less than the effect of that tædium vitæ which besets those who having no necessary employment have not devised any for themselves. And when he regarded the question in this light he almost doubted whether the invention of cards had not been more beneficial than injurious to mankind.
1 It happened during one of the lamented Southey's visits here at the Vicarage, West-Tarring, that a cargo of spirits was run close by. His remark was—“Better spirituous smuggling than spiritual pride.”
It was not with an unkind or uncharitable feeling, still less with a contemptuous one that Anne Seward mentioning the death of a lady “long invalid and far advanced in life,” described her as “a civil social being, whose care was never to offend; who had the spirit of a gentlewoman in never doing a mean thing, whose mite was never withheld from the poor; and whose inferiority of understanding and knowledge found sanctuary at the card-table, that universal leveller of intellectual distinctions.” Let not such persons be despised in the pride of intellect! Let them not be condemned in the pride of self righteousness!
“Our law,” says the Puritan Matthew Mead, “supposes all to be of some calling, not only men but women, and the young ladies too; and therefore it calls them during their virgin state spinsters. But alas, the viciousness and degeneracy of this age hath forfeited the title. Many can card, but few can spin; and therefore you may write them carders, dancers, painters, ranters, spenders, rather than spinsters. Industry is worn out by pride and delicacy; the comb and the looking-glass possess the place and the hours of the spindle and the distaff; and their great business is to curl the locks, instead of twisting wool and flax. So that both male and females are prepared for all ill impressions by the mischief of an idle education.”
“There is something strange in it,” says Sterne, “that life should appear so short in the gross, and yet so long in the detail. Misery may make it so, you'll say;—but we will exclude it,—and still you'll find, though we all complain of the shortness of life what numbers there are who seem quite overstocked with the days and hours of it, and are constantly sending out into the highways and streets of the city, to compel guests to come in, and take it off their hands: to do this with ingenuity and forecast, is not one of the least arts and business of life itself; and they who cannot succeed in it, carry as many marks of distress about them, as bankruptcy itself could wear. Be as careless as we may, we shall not always have the power,—nor shall we always be in a temper to let the account run thus. When the blood is cooled, and the spirits which have hurried us on through half our days before we have numbered one of them, are beginning to retire;—then wisdom will press a moment to be heard,—afflictions, or a bed of sickness will find their hours of persuasion:—and should they fail, there is something yet behind:—old age will overtake us at the last, and with its trembling hand, hold up the glass to us.”