At lanter the caird-lakers sat i' the loft. " [216]
The passion for card-playing appears to have been extremely prevalent in the earlier part of the reign of George III. [217] In almost every town where there is an assembly-room, traditional anecdotes are handed down of certain keen players keeping up the game for twenty-four successive hours, till they were up to their knees in cards; and there is scarcely a county in England that has not a story to tell of two or three of its old landed gentry being ruined at cards by the Prince of Wales. Even villages have their annals of gaming; of once substantial farmers turning horse-coursers and riding headlong to ruin on a leather plater; of others going more quietly off at cards, staking their corn before it was housed; and of certain desperate cock-fighters losing their whole substance at a single match, and then straightway hanging themselves in their own barn. The love of card-playing, to the great horror of the inordinately pious, seems even to have infected ladies who were, in other respects, irreproachable:—good wives, affectionate mothers, teaching their children the Catechism, going regularly to church on Sundays, and taking the sacrament every month; yet, alas! dearly loving a snug private party of four or five tables, and immensely fond of Quadrille; and making but a poor atonement for their transgression by never touching a card in Passion week, nor the night before the Communion, nor even on the Wednesdays and Fridays in Lent,—whenever they could avoid playing, "consistently with good manners." [218]
A discourse against gaming, preached in 1793, by Dr. Thomas Rennell, Master of the Temple, seems to have made much noise about the time, but no converts. The most original passage in the work is the following, wherein he asserts that the habit of card-playing renders the mind insensible of Gospel evidence: in the present day, it may be observed in passing, that a similar effect has been ascribed to the study of Oriel-college logic. "The mind of one immersed in cards soon becomes vacant, frivolous, and captious. The habits form a strange mixture of mock gravity and pert flippancy. The understanding, by a perpetual attention to a variety of unmeaning combinations, acquires a kind of pride in this bastard employment of the faculty of thought, which is so far from having any analogy to the real exercise of reason, that we generally find a miserable eminence in it attainable by the dullest, the most ignorant, and most contemptible of mankind. The gamester, however, frequently mistakes this skill for general acuteness, and from that conceit either totally rejects the Gospel evidence, or if political or professional considerations render this indecent or inexpedient, he harbours all that contemptible chicane, all that petty sophistry, all that creeping evasion, with which a selfish heart, and a contracted understanding, meets and embraces the prevailing heresy of the times in which we live." [219]
The following appears to be levelled at an individual of no small reputation in his day, and whose memory is likely to outlast Dr. Rennell's. "What is it that converts those designed by Providence to be the GUARDIANS and PROTECTORS into the BANE and CURSE of their country? I will answer, the GAMING TABLE. The reverses here every moment occurring unite beggared fortunes, mortified pride, callous baseness, and inflamed appetites, directing their joint operations to the destruction of that common mother which gave them birth. And here I wish to be rightly understood—that with a frugal, active, dignified poverty, the discharge of public duty is perfectly compatible. Such a poverty was highly reverenced in the best ages of Pagan antiquity, as the nurse of every great and useful exertion; but as distant as light from darkness is such a poverty from that degraded, malevolent, abject MENDICITY, the offspring of vice, the organ of faction, and the parent of universal prostitution and venality."
Dr. Parr, in his copy of this discourse, wrote the following note, which may serve as a tail-piece to the present chapter: "Dr. Rennell is said, with his own hand, to have put a copy of this animated sermon under the knocker of Mr. Fox's door in South street. I could wish the story to be untrue. But the eloquent preacher did not employ his great talents in a sermon against Sabbath-breaking, though his illustrious patron, Mr. Pitt, had lately fought a duel with Mr. Tierney on Wimbledon Common."
FOOTNOTES:
[109] Heller, Vom Ursprung der Spielkarten, in der Geschichte der Holzschneidekunst, s. 307.