University of Virginia Library

6. CHAPTER VI.
THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF MODERN GAMING IN ENGLAND.

IT seems that the rise of modern gaming in England may be dated from the year 1777 or 1778.

Before this time gaming appears never to have assumed an alarming aspect. The methodical system of partnership, enabling men to embark large capital in gambling establishments, was unknown; though from that period this system became the special characteristic of the pursuit among all classes of the community.

The development of the evil was a subject of great concern to thoughtful men, and one of these, in the year 1784, put forth a pamphlet, which seems to give `the very age and body of the time, his form and pressure.'[64]

`About thirty years ago,' says this writer, `there was but one club in the metropolis. It was regulated and respectable. There were few of the members who betted high. Such stakes at present would be reckoned very low indeed. There were then assemblies once a week in most of the great houses. An agreeable society met at seven o'clock; they played for crowns or half-crowns; and reached their own houses about eleven.* * * *

`There was but one lady who gamed deeply, and she was viewed in the light of a phenomenon. Were she now to be asked her real opinion of those friends who were her former *play-fellows, there can be no doubt but that they rank very low in her esteem.* * * *

`In the present era of vice and dissipation, how many females attend the card-tables! What is the consequence? The effects are too clearly to be traced to the frequent *divorces which have lately disgraced our country, and they are too visible in the shameful conduct of many ladies of fashion, since gambling became their chief amusement.* * * *

`There is now no society. The routs begin at midnight. They are painful and troublesome to the lady who receives company, and they are absolutely a nuisance to those who are honoured with a card of invitation. It is in vain to attempt conversation. The social pleasures are entirely banished, and those who have any relish for them, or who are fond of early hours, are necessarily excluded. Such are the companies of modern times, and modern people of fashion. Those who are not invited fly to the Gaming Clubs —

“To kill their idle hours and cure ennui!&”

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`To give an account of the present encumbered situation of many families, whose property was once large and ample, would fill a volume. Whence spring the difficulties which every succeeding day increases? From the Gambling Clubs. Why are they continually hunted by their creditors? The reply is — the Gambling Clubs. Why are they obliged continually to rack their invention in order to save appearances? The answer still is — the Gambling Clubs!

`The father frequently ruins his children; and

sons, and even grandsons, long before the succession opens to them, are involved so deeply that during their future lives their circumstances are rendered narrow; and they have rank or family honours, without being able to support them.

`How many infamous villains have amassed immense estates, by taking advantage of unfortunate young men, who have been first seduced and then ruined by the Gambling Clubs!* * * *

`It is well known that the old members of those gambling societies exert every nerve to enlist young men of fortune; and if we take a view of the principal estates on this island, we shall find many infamous *Christian brokers who are now living luxuriously and in splendour on the wrecks of such unhappy victims.

`At present, when a boy has learned a little from his father's example, he is sent to school, to be *initiated. In the course of a few years he acquires a profound knowledge of the science of gambling, and before he leaves the University he is perfectly fitted for a member of the Gaming Clubs, into which he is elected before he takes his seat in either House of Parliament. There is no necessity for his being of age, as the sooner he is bal

lotted for, the more advantageous his admission will prove to the *old members.

`Scarcely is the hopeful youth enrolled among these *honourable associates, than he is introduced to Jews, to annuity-brokers, and to the long train of money-lenders. They take care to answer his pecuniary calls, and the greater part of the night and morning is consumed at the Club. To his creditors and tradesmen, instead of paying his bills, he offers a *bond or *annuity. He rises just time enough to ride to Kensington Gardens; returns to dress; dines late; and then attends the party of gamblers, as he had done the night before, unless he allows himself to be detained for a few moments by the newspaper, or some political publication.

`Such do we find the present fashionable style of life, from “his Grace&” to the “Ensign&” in the Guards. Will this mode of education rear up heroes, to lead forth our armies, or to conduct our fleets to victory? Review the conduct of your generals abroad, and of your statesmen at home, during the late unfortunate war, and these questions are answered.[65]

`At present, tradesmen must themselves be gamblers before they give credit to a member of these clubs; but if a reform succeeds they will be placed in a state of security. At present they must make *regular families pay an enormous price for their goods, to enable them to run the risk of never receiving a single shilling from their gambling customers.'

Such is the picture of the times in question, drawn by a contemporary; and it may be said that private reckless and unscrupulous political machinations were the springs and fountains of all the calamities that subsequently overflowed, as it were, the `opening of the seals' of doom upon the nation.

Notwithstanding the purity of morals enjoined by the court of George III., the early part of his reign presents a picture of dissolute manners as well as of furious party spirit. The most fashionable of our ladies of rank were immersed in play, or devoted to politics: the same spirit carried them into both. The Sabbath was disregarded, spent often in cards, or desecrated by the meetings of partisans of both factions; moral duties were neglected and decorum outraged. The fact was,

that a minor court had become the centre of all the bad passions and reprehensible pursuits in vogue. Carlton House, in Pall Mall, which even the oldest of us can barely remember, with its elegant open screen, the pillars in front, its low exterior, its many small rooms, its decorations in vulgar taste, and, to crown the whole, its associations of a corrupting revelry, — Carlton House was, in the days of good King George, almost as great a scandal to the country as Whitehall in the time of improper King Charles II.[66] The influence which the example of a young prince, of manners eminently popular, produced upon the young nobility of the realm was most disastrous in every way and ruinous to public morality.

After that period, the vast license given to those abominable engines of fraud, the E.O. tables,[67] and the great length of time which elapsed before they met with any check from the police, afforded a number of dissolute and abandoned characters an

opportunity of acquiring property. This they afterwards increased in the low gaming houses, and by following up the same system at Newmarket and the other fashionable places of resort, and finally by means of the lottery, that mode of insensate gambling; till at length they acquired a sum of money nothing short of *One Million Sterling.

This enormous wealth was then used as an efficient capital in carrying on various illegal establishments, particularly gaming houses, the expenses of a first-rate house being £7000 per annum, which were again employed as the means of increasing these ill-gotten riches.

The system was progressive but steady in its development. Several of these conspicuous members of the world of fashion, rolling in their gaudy carriages and associating with men of high rank and influence, might be found on the registers of the Old Bailey, or had been formerly occupied in turning, with their own hands, E.O. tables in the public streets.

The following Queries, which are extracted from the Morning Post of July the 5th, 1797, throw considerable light upon this curious subject, and show how seriously the matter was regarded when so

public a denunciation was deemed necessary and ventured upon: —

`Is Mr Ogden (now the Newmarket oracle) the same person who, five-and-twenty years since, was an annual pedestrian to Ascot, covered with dust, amusing himself with “*pricking in the belt,&” “*hustling in the hat,&” &c., among the lowest class of rustics, at the inferior booths of the fair?

`Is D-k-y B — n, who now has his snug farm, the same person who, some years since, *drove a post chaise for T — y, of Bagshot, could neither read nor write, and was introduced to *the family only by his pre-eminence at cribbage?

`Is Mr Twycross (with his phaeton) the same person who some years since became a bankrupt in Tavistock Street, immediately commenced the Man of Fashion at Bath, kept running horses, &c., secundum artem?

`Is Mr Phillips (who has now his town and country house, in the most fashionable style) the same who was originally a linen-draper and bankrupt at Salisbury, and who made his first family entré in the metropolis, by his superiority at Bil-liards (with Captain Wallace, Orrell, &c.) at Cropley's, in Bow Street?

`Was poor carbuncled P — e (so many years the favourite decoy duck of *the family) the very barber of Oxford, who, in the midst of the operation upon a gentleman's face, laid down his razor, swearing that he would never shave another man so long as he lived, and immediately became the hero of the card table, the bones, the box, and the Cockpit?'

Capital was not the only qualification for admission into the Confederacy of Gambling. Some of the members were taken into partnership on account of their dexterity in `securing' dice or `dealing' cards. One is said to have been actually a sharer in every `Hell' at the West-End of the Town, because he was feared as much as he was detested by the firms, who had reason to know that he would `peach' if not kept quiet. Informers against the illegal and iniquitous associations were arrested and imprisoned upon writs, obtained by perjury — to deter others from similar attacks; witnesses were suborned; officers of justice bribed; ruffians and bludgeon-men employed, where gratuities failed; personal violence and even assassination threatened to all who dared to expose the crying evil — among others, to Stockdale, the well-known publisher of the day, in Piccadilly.

Then came upon the nation the muddy flood of French emigrants, poured forth by the Great Revolution — a set of men, speaking generally, whose vices contaminated the very atmosphere.

Before the advent of these worthies the number of gambling houses in the metropolis, exclusive of those so long established by subscription, was not more than half-a-dozen; but by the year 1820 they had increased to nearly fifty. Besides Faro and Hazard, the foreign games of Macao, Roulette, Rouge et Noir, &c., were introduced, and there was a graduated accommodation for all ranks, from the Peer of the Realm to the Highwayman, the Burglar, and the Pick-pocket.

At one of the watering-places, in 1803, a baronet lost £20,000 at play, and a bond for £7000. This will scarcely surprise us when we consider that at the time above five hundred notorious characters supported themselves in the metropolis by this species of robbery, and in the summer spread themselves through the watering-places for their professional operations. Some of them kept bankers, and were possessed of considerable property in the funds and in land, and went their *circuits as regularly as the judges. Most excellent

judges they were, too, of the condition of a `pigeon.'

In a great commercial city where, from the extent of its trade, manufacture, and revenue, there must be an immense circulation of property, the danger is not to be conceived of the allurements which were thus held out to young men in business having the command of money, as well as the clerks of merchants, bankers, and others. In fact, too many of this class proved, at the bar of justice, the consequence of their resort to these complicated scenes of vice, idleness, extravagance, misfortune, and crime. Among innumerable instances are the following: — In 1796, a shopman to a grocer in the city was seduced into a gaming party, where he first lost all his own money, and ultimately what his master had intrusted him with. He hanged himself in his bed-room a few hours afterwards.

In the same year, Lord Kenyon in summing up a case of the kind said: — `It was extremely to be lamented that the vice of gambling had descended to the very lowest orders of the people. It was prevalent among the highest ranks of society, who had set the example to their inferiors, and who, it seemed, were too great for the law. I wish

they could be punished. If any prosecutions are fairly brought before me, and the parties are justly convicted, whatever may be their rank or station in the country — though they should be the first ladies in the land — they shall certainly exhibit themselves in the pillory.'

In 1820, James Lloyd, one of the harpies who practised on the credulity of the lower orders by keeping a Little Go, or illegal lottery, was brought up for the twentieth time, to answer for that offence. This man was a methodist preacher, and assembled his neighbours together at his dwelling on a Saturday to preach the gospel to them, and the remainder of the week he was to be found, with an equally numerous party, instructing them in the ruinous vice of gambling. The charge was clearly proved, and the prisoner was sentenced to three months' imprisonment with hard labour.

In the same year numbers of young persons robbed their masters to play at a certain establishment called Morley's Gambling House, in the City, and were ruined there. Some were brought to justice at the Old Bailey; others, in the madness caused by their losses, destroyed themselves; and some escaped to other countries, by their own

activity, or through the influence of their friends.

A traveller of the coachmakers, Messrs Houlditch of Long Acre, embezzled or applied to his own use considerable sums of money belonging to them. It appeared in evidence that the prisoner was sent by his employers to the Continent to take orders for carriages; he was allowed a handsome salary, and was furnished with carriages for sale. The money he received for them he was to send to his employers, after deducting his expenses; but instead of so doing, he gambled nearly the whole of it away. The following letter to his master was put in by way of explanation of his career: — `Sir, — The errors into which I have fallen have made me so hate myself that I have adopted the horrible resolution of destroying myself. I am sensible of the crime I commit against God, my family, and society, but have not courage to live dishonoured. The generous confidence you placed in me I have basely violated; I have robbed you, and though not to enrich myself, the consciousness of it destroys me. Bankruptcy, poverty, beggary, and want I could bear — conscious integrity would support me: but the ill-fated acquaintance I formed led me to those earthly hells — gambling houses; and

then commenced my villainies and deceptions to you. My losses were not large at first; and the stories that were told me of gain made me hope they would soon be recovered. At this period I received the order to go to Vienna, and on settling at the hotel I found my debts treble what I had expected. I was in consequence compelled to leave the two carriages as a guarantee for part of the debt, which I had not in my power to discharge. I had hoped such success at Vienna as would enable me to state all to you; but disappointment blasted every hope, and despair, on my return to Paris, began to generate the fatal resolution which, at the moment you read this, will have matured itself to consummation. I feel that my reputation is blasted; no way left of re-imbursing the money wasted, your confidence in me totally destroyed, and nothing left to me but to see my wife and children, and die. Affection for them holds me in existence a little longer. The gaming table again presented itself to my imagination as the only possible means of extricating myself. Count Montoni's 3000 francs, which I received before you came to Paris, furnished me with the means — my death speaks the result! After robbery so base as mine, I fear it will be of no use for me to solicit your kindness for my wretched wife and forlorn family. Oh, Sir, if you have pity on them and treat them kindly, and do not leave them to perish in a foreign land, the consciousness of the act will cheer you in your last moments, and God will reward you and yours for it tenfold. Their sensibilities will not cause them to need human aid. Thus I shall be threefold the murderer. I thank you for the kindness you have rendered me; and I assure your brother that he has, in this dreadful moment, my ardent wishes for his welfare here and hereafter. I have so contrived it that you will see a person at the Prince's tomorrow, who will interpret for you. In mentioning my fate to him, you will not much serve your own interest by blackening my character and memory. I subjoin the reward of my villainies and the correct balance of the account. Count Edmond's regular bills I have not received; his valet will give you them; the others are in a pocket-book, which will be found on my corpse somewhere in the wood of Boulogne.

`Signed,

W. KINSBY.'

It appears, however, that the gentleman changed

his mind and did not commit suicide, but surrendered at the Insolvent Debtor's Court to be dealt with according to law, which was a much wiser resolution.

To the games of Faro, Hazard, Macao, Doodle-do, and Rouge et Noir, more even than to horse-racing, many tradesmen, once possessing good fortunes and great business, owed their destruction. Thousands upon thousands have been ruined in the vicinity of St James's. It was not confined to youths of fortune only, but the decent and respectable tradesman, as well as the dashing clerk of the merchant and banker, was ingulfed in its vortex.

The proprietors of gaming houses were also concerned in fraudulent insurances, and employed a number of clerks while the lotteries were drawing, who conducted the business without risk, in counting,-houses, where no insurances were taken, but to which books were carried, as well as from the different offices in every part of the town, as from the Morocco-men, who went from door to door taking insurances and enticing the poor and middling ranks to adventure.

It was gambling, and not the burdens of the long war, nor the revulsion from war to peace, that

made so many bankruptcies in the few years succeeding the Battle of Waterloo. It was the plunderers at gaming tables that filled the gazettes and made the gaols overflow with so many victims.

A foreigner has advanced an opinion as to the source of the gambling propensity of Englishmen. `The English,' says M. Dunne,[68] `the most speculative nation on earth, calculate even upon future contingences. Nowhere else is the adventurous rage for stock-jobbing carried on to so great an extent. The fury of gambling, so common in England, is undoubtedly a daughter of this speculative genius. The Greeks of Great Britain are, however, much in-ferior to those of France in cunning and industry. A certain Frenchman who assumed in London the title and manners of a baron, has been known to surpass all the most dexterous rogues of the three kingdoms in the art of robbing. His aide-de-camp was a kind of German captain, or rather chevalier d'industrie, a person who had acted the double character of a French spy and an English officer at the same time. Their tactics being at length discovered, the baron was obliged to quit the country;

and he is said to have afterwards entered the monastery of La Trappe,' where doubtless, in the severe and gloomy religious practices of that ter-rible penitentiary, he atoned for his past enormities.

`Till near the commencement of the present century the favourite game was Faro, and as it was a decided advantage to hold the Bank, masters and mistresses, less scrupulous than Wilberforce, frequently volunteered to fleece and amuse the company. But scandal having made busy with the names of some of them, it became usual to hire a pro-fessed gamester at five or ten guineas a night, to set up a table for the evening, just as any operatic professional might now-a-days be hired for a concert, or a band-master for a ball.

`Faro gradually dropped out of fashion; Macao took its place; Hazard was never wanting; and Whist began to be played for stakes which would have satisfied Fox himself, who, though it was calculated that he might have netted four or five thousand a year by games of skill, complained that they afforded no excitement.

`Wattier's Club, in Piccadilly, was the resort of the Macao players. It was kept by an old maître

d'hôtel of George IV., a character in his way, who took a just pride in the cookery and wines of his establishment.

`All the brilliant stars of fashion (and fashion was power then) frequented Wattier's, with Beau Brummell for their sun. `Poor Brummell, dead, in misery and idiotcy, at Caen! and I remember him in all his glory, cutting his jokes after the opera, at White's, in a black velvet great-coat, and a cocked hat on his well-powdered head.

`Nearly the same turn of reflection is suggested as we run over the names of his associates. Almost all of them were ruined — three out of four irretrievably. Indeed, it was the forced expatriation of its supporters that caused the club to be broken up.

`During the same period (from 1810 to 1815 or thereabouts) there was a great deal of high play at White's and Brookes', particularly at Whist. At Brookes' figured some remarkable characters — as Tippoo Smith, by common consent the best Whist-player of his day; and an old gentleman nicknamed Neptune, from his having once flung himself into the sea in a fit of despair at being, as he thought, ruined. He was fished out in time, found he was

not ruined, and played on during the remainder of his life.

`The most distinguished player at White's was the nobleman who was presented at the Salons in Paris as Le Wellington des Joueurs (Lord Rivers); and he richly merited the name, if skill, temper, and the most daring courage are titles to it. The greatest genius, however, is not infallible. He once lost three thousand four hundred pounds at Whist by not remembering that the seven of hearts was in! He played at Hazard for the highest stakes that any one could be got to play for with him, and at one time was supposed to have won nearly a hundred thousand pounds; but *it all went, along with a great deal more, at Crockford's.

`There was also a great deal of play at Graham's, the Union, the Cocoa Tree, and other clubs of the second order in point of fashion. Here large sums were hazarded with equal rashness, and remarkable characters started up. Among the most conspicuous was the late Colonel Aubrey, who literally passed his life at play. He did nothing else, morning, noon, and night; and it was computed that he had paid more than sixty thousand pounds for card-money. He was a very fine player at all

games, and a shrewd, clever man. He had been twice to India and made two fortunes. It was said that he lost the first on his way home, trans-ferred himself from one ship to another without landing, went back, and made the second. His life was a continual alternation between poverty and wealth; and he used to say, the greatest pleasure in life is winning at cards — the next greatest, losing!

`For several years deep play went on at all these clubs, fluctuating both as to amount and locality, till by degrees it began to flag. It had got to a low ebb when Mr Crockford came to London and established the celebrated club which bore his name.

`Some good was certainly produced by the system. In the first place, private gambling (between gentleman and gentleman), with its degrading incidents, is at an end. In the second place, this very circumstance brings the worst part of the practice within the reach of the law. Public gambling, which only existed by and through what were popularly termed hells, might be easily suppressed. There were, in 1844, more than twenty of these establishments in Pall Mall, Piccadilly,

and St James's, called into existence by Crockford's success.'[69]

Whilst such was the state of things among the aristocracy and those who were able to consort with them, it seems that the lower orders were pursuing `private gambling,' in their `ungenteel' fashion, to a very sad extent. In 1834 a writer in the `Quarterly' speaks as follows: —

`Doncaster, Epsom, Ascot, and Warwick, and most of our numerous race-grounds and race-towns, are scenes of destructive and universal gambling among the lower orders, which our absurdly lax police never attempt to suppress; and yet, without the slightest approach to an improperly harsh interference with the pleasures of the people, the Roulette and E.O. tables, which plunder the peasantry at these places for the benefit of travelling sharpers (certainly equally respectable with some bipeds of prey who drive coroneted cabs near St James's), might be put down by any watchful magistrate.'[70]

I fear that something similar may be suggested at the present day, as to the same notorious localities.

Mr Sala, writing some years ago on gambling in England, said: —

`The passion for gambling is, I believe, innate; but there is, happily, a very small percentage of the population who are born with a propensity for high play. We are speculative and eagerly commercial; but it is rare to discover among us that inveterate love for gambling, as gambling, which you may find among the Italians, the South American Spaniards, the Russians, and the Poles. Moro, Baccara, Tchuka — these are games at which continental peasants will wager and lose their little fields, their standing crops, their harvest in embryo, their very wives even. The Americans surpass us in the ardour of their propitiation of the gambling goddess, and on board the Mississippi steamboats, an enchanting game, called Poker, is played with a delirium of excitement, whose intensity can only be imagined by realizing that famous bout at “catch him who can,&” which took place at the horticultural fête immortalized by Mr Samuel Foote, comedian, at which was present the great Panjandrum himself, with the little round button at top, the festivities continuing till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of the company's boots.

`When I was a boy, not so very long — say twenty years — since, the West-end of London swarmed with illicit gambling houses, known by a name I will not offend your ears by repeating. On every race-course there was a public gambling booth and an abundance of thimble-riggers' stalls. These, I am happy to state, exist no longer; and the fools who are always ready to be plucked, can only, in gambling, fall victims to the commonest and coarsest of swindlers; skittle sharps, beer-house rogues and sharpers, and knaves who travel to entrap the unwary in railway carriages with loaded dice, marked cards, and little squares of green baize for tables, and against whom the authorities of the railway companies very properly warn their passengers. A notorious gambling house in St James's Street — Crockford's, — where it may be said, without exaggeration, that millions of pounds sterling have been diced away by the fools of fashion, is now one of the most sumptuous and best conducted dining establishments in London — the “Wellington.&” The semipatrician Hades that were to be found in the purlieus of St James's, such as the “Cocoa Tree,&” the “Berkeley,&” and the “stick-shop,&” at the corner of Albemarle Street — a

whole Pandemonium of rosewood and plate-glass dens — never recovered from a razzia made on them simultaneously one night by the police, who were organized on a plan of military tactics, and under the command of Inspector Beresford; and at a concerted signal assailed the portals of the infamous places with sledge-hammers. At the time to which I refer, in Paris, the Palais Royal, and the environs of the Boulevards des Italiens, abounded with magnificent gambling rooms similar to those still in existence in Hombourg, which were regularly licensed by the police, and farmed under the municipality of the Ville de Paris; a handsome per-centage of the iniquitous profits being paid towards the charitable institutions of the French metropolis. There are very many notabilities of the French Imperial Court, who were then fermiers des jeux, or gambling house contractors; and only a year or two since Doctor Louis Véron, ex-dealer in quack medicines, ex-manager of the Grand Opera, and ex-proprietor of the “Consti-tutionnel&” newspaper, offered an enormous royalty to Government for the privilege of establishing a gambling house in Paris. But the Emperor Napoleon — all ex-member of Crockford's as he is — sensibly declined the tempting bait. A similarly “generous&” offer was made last year to the Belgian Government by a joint-stock company who wanted to establish public gaming tables at the watering-places of Ostend, and who offered to establish an hospital from their profits; but King Leopold, the astute proprietor of Claremont, was as prudent as his Imperial cousin of France, and refused to soil his hands with cogged dice. The lease of the Paris authorized gaming houses expired in 1836-7; and the municipality, albeit loath to lose the fat annual revenue, was induced by governmental pressure not to renew it; and it is asserted that from that moment the number of annual suicides in Paris very sensibly decreased. “It is not generally known,&” as the penny-a-liners say, “that the Rev. Caleb Colton, a clergyman of the Church of England, and the author of “Lacon,&” a book replete with aphoristic wisdom, blew his brains out in the forest of St Germains, after ruinous losses at Frascati's, at the corner of the Rue Richelieu and the Boulevards, one of the most noted of the Maisons des Jeux, and which was afterwards turned into a *restaurant, and is now a shawl-shop.[71] Just before the revolution of 1848, nearly all the watering-places in the Prusso-Rhenane provinces, and in Bavaria, and Hesse, Nassau, and Baden, contained Kursaals, where gambling was openly carried on. These existed at Aix-la-Chapelle, Baden-Baden, Wiesbaden, Ems, Kissengen, and at Spa, close to the Prussian frontier, in Belgium. It is due to the fierce democrats who revolted against the monarchs of the defunct Holy Alliance, to say that they utterly swept away the gambling-tables in Rhenish-Prussia, and in the Grand Duchy of Baden. Herr Hecker, of the red republican tendencies, and the astounding wide-awake hat, particularly distinguished himself in the latter place by his iconoclastic animosity to Roulette and Rouge et Noir. When dynastic “order&” was restored the Rhine gaming tables were re-established. The Prussian Government, much to its honour, has since shut up the gambling houses at that resort for decayed nobility and ruined livers, Aix-la-Chapelle. A motion was made in the Federal Diet, sitting at Frankfort, to constrain the smaller governments, in the interest of the Germanic good name generally, to close their tripots, and in some measure the Federal authorities succeeded. The only existing continental gaming houses authorized by government are now the two Badens, Spa (of which the lease is nearly expired, and will not be renewed), Monaco (capital of the ridiculous little Italian principality, of which the suzerain is a scion of the house of “Grimaldi&”), Malmöe, in Sweden, too remote to do much harm, and HOMBOURG. This last still flourishes greatly, and I am afraid is likely to flourish, though happily in isolation; for, as I have before remarked, the “concession&” or privilege of the place has been guaranteed for a long period of years to come by the expectant dynasty of Hesse-Darmstadt. “C'est fait,&” “It is all settled,&” said the host of the Hôtel de France to me, rubbing his hands exultingly when I mentioned the matter. But, Quis custodiet custodes? Hesse-Darmstadt has guaranteed the “administration of Hesse-Hombourg, but who is to guarantee Hesse-Darmstadt? A battalion of French infantry would, it seems to me, make short work of H. D., lease guarantees, Federal contingent, and all. I must mention, in conclusion, that within a very few years we had, if we have not still, a licensed gaming house in our exquisitely moral British dominions. This was in that remarkably “tight little island&” at the mouth of the Elbe, Heligoland, which we so queerly possess — Puffendorf, Grotius, and Vattel, or any other writers on the Jus gentium, would be puzzled to tell why, or by what right. I was at Hamburg in the autumn of 1856, crossed over to Heligoland one day on a pleasure trip, and lost some money there, at a miniature Roulette table, much frequented by joyous Israelites from the mainland, and English “soldier officers&” in mufti. I did not lose much of my temper, however, for the odd, quaint little place pleased me. Not so another Roman citizen, or English travelling gent., who losing, perhaps, seven-and-sixpence, wrote a furious letter to the “Times,&” complaining of such horrors existing under the British flag, desecration of the English name, and so forth. Next week the lieutenant-governor, by “order,&” put an end to Roulette at Heligoland; but play on a diminutive scale has since, I have been given to understand, recommenced there without molestation.

`We gamble in England at the Stock Exchange, we gamble on horse-races all the year round; but there is something more than the mere eventuality

of a chance that prompts us to the enjeu; there is mixed up with our eagerness for the stakes the most varied elements of business and pleasure; cash-books, ledgers, divident-warrants, indignation meetings of Venezuelan bond-holders, coupons, cases of champagne, satin-skinned horses with plaited manes, grand stands, pretty faces, bright flags, lobster salads, cold lamb, fortune-telling gipsies, barouches-and-four, and “our Aunt Sally.&” High play is still rife in some aristocratic clubs; there are prosperous gentlemen who wear clean linen every day, and whose names are still in the Army List, who make their five or six hundred a year by Whist-playing, and have nothing else to live upon; in East-end coffee-shops, sallow-faced Jew boys, itinerant Sclavonic jewellers, and brawny German sugar-bakers, with sticky hands, may be found glozing and wrangling over their beloved cards and dominoes, and screaming with excitement at the loss of a few pence. There are yet some occult nooks and corners, nestling in unsavoury localities, on passing which the policeman, even in broad daylight, cannot refrain from turning his head a little backwards — as though some bedevilments must necessarily be taking place directly he has passed — where, in musty back parlours, by furtive lamplight, with doors barred, bolted, and sheeted with iron, some wretched, cheating gambling goes on at unholy hours. Chicken-hazard is scotched, not killed; but a poor, weazened, etiolated biped is that once game-bird now. And there is Doncaster, every year — Doncaster, with its subscription-rooms under authority, winked at by a pious corporation, patronized by nobles and gentlemen supporters of the turf, and who are good enough, sometimes, to make laws for us plebeians in the Houses of Lords and Commons. There is Doncaster, with policemen to keep order, and admit none but “respectable&” people — subscribers, who fear Heaven and honour the Queen. Are you aware, my Lord Chief-Justice, are you aware, Mr Attorney, Mr Solicitor-General, have you the slightest notion, ye Inspectors of Police, that in the teeth of the law, and under its very eyes, a shameless gaming-house exists in moral Yorkshire, throughout every Doncaster St Leger race-week? Of course you haven't; never dreamed of such a thing — never could, never would. Hie you, then, and prosecute this wretched gang of betting-touts, congregating at the corner of Bride Lane, Fleet Street; quick, lodge informa tions against this publican who has suffered card-playing to take place, raffles, or St Leger sweeps to be held in his house. “You have seen a farmer's dog bark at a beggar, and the creature run from the cur. There thou might'st behold the great image of authority: a dog's obeyed in office.&” You have — very well. Take crazy King Lear's words as a text for a sermon against legislative inconsistencies, and come back with me to Hombourg Kursaal.'