When were the dice with more profusion thrown?
The well-filled fob not emptied now alone,
But gamesters for whole patrimonies play:
The steward brings the deeds which must convey
The lost estate. What more than madness reigns,
When one short sitting many hundreds drains,
And not enough is left him to supply
Board wages, or a footman's livery?"
During the reign of Charles II, the business of card-making greatly increased in England: and the game appears to have been so generally understood as to induce many ingenious persons to employ cards not only as a means of diffusing useful and entertaining knowledge, but also of advertising their wares. The same mode of instruction was adopted about the same period in France; but in England it appears to have embraced a wider range of subjects; in France, scientific cards appear to have been devised for the exclusive use of the nobility and gentry, and to have been confined to their instruction in the conundrums of heraldry and the elements of history and geography; [178] while in England they were "adapted to the meanest capacity;" and in addition to the uses for which they were employed in France, were made subservient to the purposes of communicating knowledge in grammar, history, politics, morality, mathematics, and the art of carving.
A Mons. De Brainville invented at Lyons, about 1660, a pack of Heraldic cards, in which the Aces and Knaves, "les As et Valets," were represented by the arms of certain princes and nobles. Now as this was evidently a breach of etiquette and a derogation of heraldic nobility—Mons. De Brainville, like Mr. Anstis, does not seem to have rightly understood his own "foolish business" [179]—the plates were seized by the magistrates. As it appeared, however, that he had given offence through pure inadvertence, and not with any satirical intention, the plates were restored to him on condition of his altering the odious names of "As" and "Valets" into Princes and Chevaliers. In 1678 Antoine Bulifon carried the same kind of cards to Naples, where Don Annibal Aquaviva established a society to play at Blazon, under the name of "Armeristi," with the map of Europe for a device, and the motto, "Pulchra sub imagine Ludi." [180]