in question; they have, it may be presumed, most chivalrously rushed into the arena to take the bull by the horns, from the mere desire of reestablishing the equilibrium of the battle, and have fought obstinately in defence of the cause, for no other reason than because it is obviously indefensible. If the purity of a motive can in any instance justify the means, the necessity of this case must be allowed to warrant a trifling substitution of rage for reason, of calumnies for considerations, and of abuse for argument and it is by this train of ratiocination that I would explain the eagerness with which the most virulent and personal publications are bought up and devoured as fast as they appear, and the unblushing frankness with which men laying the highest claim to Christian charity, (whose sanctity approaches to bigotry, and whose piety rises nearly to the temperature of fanaticism,) give their staunchest support to the most active and persevering dealers in misrepresentation. So universal is this feeling of justice and equality among Englishmen, that "a clear ring and a fair fight" might be taken for the national motto; and in this respect I own myself so truly English, that I feel a general interest in favour of every party, person, or question, that may be supposed to have the worst of it. Without going the length of Champfort, who asserts, that "il y a à parier que toute idée publique, toute convention reçue est un sottise, car elle a convenue au plus grand nombre," I freely confess myself much given to distrust all fashionable prejudices; and whenever I see the current opinion setting with a preternatural strength and rapidity, I am apt at once to conclude the existence of unusual shallows. It is in this spirit that I proceed to take up the cudgels in behalf of gaming and gamesters, a description of persons at present very much under the hatches; and that I shall endeavour to put in a good word for those of whom nobody is disposed to speak well. From the time that the general pacification of Europe had opened the door of the Continent to Englishmen, when (to use an expression of our neighbours) we were no longer prisoners in our own island, nor exiled from the pleasures of Paris, the practice of gaming took a sudden and extensive developement; and that art, which at first had been confined to the highest and most cultivated members of society, became at once a pursuit of the lower and middle classes. During this heyday of its prosperity I never let fall one word in recommendation of a practice, which, however advantageous to the community, and agreeable to the individual, seemed to stand in need neither of patronage nor support. However valuable I might have deemed the novelty, either as it respects morals or political economy; however much I might have considered the public at large benefited by its dissemination, I abstained even from good words, and turned my attention to other subjects, which seemed at the time in greater need of a little friendly assistance. But now that a recent fatality, that need not be further specified, has thrown a gloom over the leading gamblers in low life, that gambling itself has fallen upon evil days, and that no one, who is not wholly above, or below public opinion, will be seen going to "hell" in open daylight, it seems a duty to step forward, and place a shield between the shafts of calumny and the feelings of the unoffending victims of this untoward combination of accidental circumstances. Were I to insert all that might be said in favour of gambling,-physiologically, as stirring up the blood, rousing the animal spirits, and forwarding the capillary circulation; morally, as preventing idleness, dissipating ennui, and counteracting the hypochondriasis of love; politically, as superseding aristocratical conspiracies; economically, as favouring the circulation of capital; sentimentally, dramatically, mathematically, gastrologically, and phrenologically, (or more properly, phrensilogically,) in ways too numerous to specify-I should not be guilty of less than, in the phrase of the trade, "one thick volume in 8vo." I shall, therefore, on the present occasion, use discretion, and confine myself to what is most important, quintessential, and original. In the first place, touching the antiquity of gaming, which, in these legitimate days, is no small matter, the practice is older than any reigning house in Europe-older than the Courtenays-older than the Massimi of Rome, the lineal descendants from Fabius Cunctator, whose remote ancestor, in defiance of Pythagoras, first taught the pugnacious republicans, his fellow-citizens, to eat beans and bacon. Nay, it is not impossible that hop-scotch and chuck-farthing may have begun in paradise. For there are a vast many persons who cannot understand how Adam could have killed time in his primitive state without some equivalent for that which is so essential in our own days, short whist and écarté ;—a convincing argument that the father of mankind must have played at some game of chance even before the fall. The Noachidæ also, shut up in the ark during forty consecutive rainy days, would have perished of ennui, without a billiard-table or a little chicken hazard. But leaving the field of conjecture, and descending to recorded history, we find that Palamedes invented, or revived, the use of dice in a time of great famine, for the purpose of silencing an insurrection of the bowels,--which leads to the mention of one important public end to be attained by gambling, namely, that in a nation subject to tithes, taxes, poor-rates, and corn-laws, by which the people become so liable to short commons, an adequate safety-valve may be provided for venting popular discontent. Let the "good people" say what they will, and the Vice Society rage as it may against skittle-grounds and ballalleys, they will not make us believe that they would not be too happy in times of popular commotion and petitioning to see the people engaged, like the Grecians of Palamedes, over a hit at backgammon; or that even the bench of Bishops themselves would not be better pleased to see "the Major" engaged at a sly game at cards on a Sunday, than labouring every day in the week, velis remisque, at universal suffrage. Would it not likewise afford vast relief to ministers to behold Mr. Hume, with a pin in one hand and a card in the other, pricking down the chances at rouge et noir, instead of marking oversights and false calculations in the Chancellor's budget? And would not all Europe greatly delight in an adequate assurance that the Holy Allies met in congress, not upon the divisions of ames and demiames, but to settle their differences by an innocent round at "blind hooky?" For my own part, I always look forward to halcyon days, when ministers are seen oftener at White's than in Downing-street: and I would much rather have Mr. Robinson's hand eternally in his own purse in the house in Bennet-street, than dabbling with the purse of the public in another house, which shall be nameless. That gambling is, in an economical point of view, highly favourable to the developement of national wealth, must be obvious to the meanest observer why, otherwise, should all mankind so much prefer to make their fortune by some speculating manoeuvre, to attaining it by the more regular, but tedious process of honest industry? Cotton-spinning machines and steam-engines are admirable instruments for making a large fortune rapidly; but when did they build up so rapidly the colossal wealth of a Rothschild, and enable a man to count his store by millions of pounds sterling? The spirit of gaming is not, however, confined to St. James's-street, the Stock-exchange, or to Mark lane; it pervades the whole of trade. That gaming, then, is so bad as some pretend, we can never be persuaded. But what is much more convincing still, the most pious of our finance ministers have for years encouraged, by their annual lotteries, ay and provoked the common people to sell or pawn their last rag to indulge a passion for play; and that, too, in the nineteenth century, when the press groans with works on morals and political economy. It is true that the police are constantly at work in hunting out and seizing hazard-tables, and the Vice Society is not less actively engaged in prosecuting gamblers on the more than suspicious evidence of vagabonds and professional informers, thus putting down one vice by the aid of a greater; but that this does not proceed from any alleged immorality of the practice is evident in this, that these operations are brought to bear only against the lower orders of gamesters. For it can never be believed that an act can be just and right in a man of ten thousand a year which is vicious and reprehensible in an artisan ; and it is difficult to imagine any reason why O-E tables and roulettes should be hunted for in holes and corners, while speculators in the Funds and money-lenders are made barons of the Holy Roman Empire. If indeed we examine the matter a little more deeply, we shall find that under various disguised forms, gambling is among the respectable employments of life. Smuggling, which, though illegal as against our own treasury, is commendable industry when directed against the exchequer of foreign nations,-is a mere game of chance, in which one prize is said to cover three blanks. So also though piracy is criminal without a letter of mark, it is good and lawful when invested with that formality and piracy is conceived and executed in the true spirit of gambling. War is gambling upon the largest and most ruinous scale; and in this it agrees with the more ordinary games of chance, that let who will win, the "pull of the table" is equally against all the players. In both instances alike, cupidity grows with what it feeds on, and the fortunate player is but too apt to kick down all his winnings in a desperate struggle to ruin every opponent and clear the board. Thus Napoleon at Moscow was but a common instance of a heated gamester staking his all against the nothing of a parcel of beggared sharpers, and putting the prosperity of years to issue on a single stake of double or quits. But of all the creditable forms of gambling none is more reckless and desperate than a suit at law. The "glorious uncertainty of the law" is matter of proverbial notoriety; and so much are lawyers aware that the pleasure of pleading is confined to its hazards, that every effort is employed to convert the statute-book into an encyclopædia of cha 66 rades and conundrums, in which "my first" finds matter for an action, 'my second" for a suit in Chancery, while my_tout" completely ruins both plaintiff and defendant in an appeal to the Lords. This being, as it is, a self-evident verity, it cannot be imagined that so many sad and learned personages should in all ages of the British history have started from their seats (their very wigs standing on end with horror,) with a “nolumus leges Anglie mutari" in their mouths, as often as any one has ventured to hint at simplification and certainty in law,-if gambling really deserved vituperation as a vice. Nay, even when dabbling in capital crimes was proved to have been rendered a lottery speculation by the perverse complexity and severity of our criminal code, Sir S. Romilly and Sir James Macintosh made not a jot the more impression upon the dogged supporters of the "wisdom of their ancestors." Another accredited and very wholesale mode of gambling is a contested election; by which a man is by no means disgraced, although he should place the subsistence of his whole family for the next seven years at issue, in the hope of what he may make, by being returned to some assembly in which he can repay himself for his trouble and outlay by a judicious employment of his "most sweet voice." Hunting and shooting,-both gentlemanly amusements; and for the latter of which more especially, a whole section of severities is foisted into the criminal code, and human life itself set at nought-may also be considered as a species of gaming, since the uncertainty of the chace forms the greatest part of its pleasure. Like all other games of chance, its attraction is vastly enhanced by a bet. Without this excitement, it is inconceivable that any man of sense would go through more labour than a slaughtering butcher, and destroy without compunction eighty or an hundred birds in a morning. One very silly prejudice against gambling, which it is important to obviate, is its supposed tendency to promote suicide-a circumstance, which, if verified, must be rather considered as advantageous, for though Aller à l'autre monde est très grande sottise yet, as no one has a right to live, for whom Nature has not provided a place at her table, to what end should a man encumber the earth, who has gambled away his ticket of admission to the feast? In point of fact, the self-destruction of such gentry is in general a saving to the state, which otherwise must, in nine cases out of ten, pay for the rope, and bear all the other legal expenses of their viaticum to the world to come. Then as to the feelings of wives, &c. it is very hard indeed if a woman whose husband se suicide for losses at play, does not provide herself with another and a better man before the year of mourning has run round. The same arguments apply to the connexion of gambling with duels; with the additional consideration, that in the latter case two gamesters may be provided for at a time, instead of one. But if any doubt remains in the reader's mind concerning the innocence of gaming, let him remember that the most Christian government in Europe openly raises a revenue from the gaming-tables of all classes, -a government which, not content with forcing religion on its own subjects, crams it down the throats of a neighbour at the point of the bayonet. Is it credible that the worshipers of the god of St. Louis (of course a much greater god than the god of St. Paul and St. Peter), the devotees of the Virgin, the advocates of monkery, and the persecutors of heresy, would for a moment tolerate a practice which was in reality subversive of all morality? Would even our English government, which lays less open pretensions to godliness, expend large sums in the maintenance of horse-races, if there were such horrible sin in throwing a whole province into a periodical mania of gaming? The English are famous as the greatest betters in all the known wo`ld; insomuch that there is no debateable question, from the speed of a maggot to the sublimest doctrines of religion, which has not been made by them the subject of a wager. I have heard of a country squire offering the parson of his parish to hold a cool hundred with him against the corporal being of the devil: and the history is recorded of a poor fellow who actually hung himself, in order to win a wager he had laid that he would do so. How much the English are a betting people is evinced in the singular fact, that they alone have turned prize-fighting into a source of pecuniary contention. It is not recorded that the shows of the Roman amphitheatre, or the great games of Greece ever produced a bet. No one appears to have even thought of pitting Eschylus or Aristophanes against the field; nor, when the factions of the circus ran highest, though the women pulled caps and the men intrigued for their favourite colour, did they dream of silencing an opponent with the long odds. Now though the practice of deriving pecuniary benefit from black eyes and bloody noses, and turning an honest penny by battery and manslaughter, might perhaps have been deemed barbarous and blackguard, had it subsisted among the Malays, or our natural enemies the Turks, yet, being English, none but a Jacobin and a leveller can doubt of its propriety; and nothing can be more disloyal than the present outcry against the "fancy." If after what I have said the reader is still disposed to think they are wrong, and to maintain that gaming in any of its shapes is discreditable and vicious, I will only add this one convincing argument-I'll hold him a rump and dozen he is a spooney; and, be he who he may, I say "done" first. M. STANZAS. Oн let me never see controll'd In that sweet spring-time of the mind, Let me not see Art's fingers rude With cold and withering touch deface, Transparent truth and native grace. Are lost, if but a feather wave |