The happy revolution. Why should we then suspect or fear So smiles upon us the first morn, And speaks us good so soon as born? For the worst ills (we daily see) Than the best fortunes that do fall; Than those do of the other sort: Appears ungrateful in the case, 5 ΙΟ 15 20 And merits not the good he has. Then let us welcome the New Guest With lusty brimmers of the best; Mirth always should Good Fortune meet, 25 And though the Princess turn her back, We better shall by far hold out, Till the next Year she face about. How say you, reader - do not these verses smack of the 30 rough magnanimity of the old English vein? Do they not fortify like a cordial; enlarging the heart, and productive of sweet blood, and generous spirits, in the concoction? Where be those puling fears of death, just now expressed or affected? Passed like a cloud- absorbed in the purging sunlight 35 of clear poetry-clean washed away by a wave of genuine Helicon, your only Spa for these hypochondries - And now another cup of the generous! and a merry New Year, and many of them, to you all, my masters! VII. MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST "A CLEAR fire, a clean hearth,1 and the rigour of the game." 5 This was the celebrated wish of old Sarah Battle (now with God), who, next to her devotions, loved a good game at whist. She was none of your lukewarm gamesters, your half and half players, who have no objection to take a hand, if you want one to make up a rubber; who affirm that they have no pleasure in 10 winning; that they like to win one game and lose another; 2 that they can while away an hour very agreeably at a cardtable, but are indifferent whether they play or no; and will desire an adversary, who has slipped a wrong card, to take it up and play another. These insufferable triflers are the curse 15 of a table. One of these flies will spoil a whole pot. Of such it may be said, that they do not play at cards, but only play at playing at them. Sarah Battle was none of that breed. She detested them, as I do, from her heart and soul; and would not, save upon 20 a striking emergency, willingly seat herself at the same table with them. She loved a thorough-paced partner, a determined enemy. She took, and gave no concessions. She hated favours. She never made a revoke, nor ever passed it over in her adversary without exacting the utmost forfeiture. She fought a 25 good fight: cut and thrust. She held not her good sword (her 1 This was before the introduction of rugs, reader. You must remember the intolerable crash of the unswept cinder, betwixt your foot and the marble. 2 As if a sportsman should tell you he liked to kill a fox one day, and lose him the next. have their blind side cards) “like a dancer." She sat bolt upright; and neither showed you her cards, nor desired to see yours. All people their superstitions; and I have heard her declare, under the rose, that Hearts was her favourite suit. I never in my life—and I knew Sarah Battle many of the 5 best years of it saw her take out her snuff-box when it was her turn to play; or snuff a candle in the middle of a game; or ring for a servant, till it was fairly over. She never introduced, or connived at, miscellaneous conversation during its process. As she emphatically observed, cards were cards: 10 and if I ever saw unmingled distaste in her fine last-century countenance, it was at the airs of a young gentleman of a literary turn, who had been with difficulty persuaded to take a hand; and who, in his excess of candour, declared, that he thought there was no harm in unbending the mind now 15 and then, after serious studies, in recreations of that kind! She could not bear to have her noble occupation, to which she wound up her faculties, considered in that light. It was her business, her duty, the thing she came into the world to do, — and she did it. She unbent her mind afterwards over a book. 20 Pope was her favourite author; his Rape of the Lock her favourite work. She once did me the favour to play over with me (with the cards) his celebrated game of Ombre in that poem; and to explain to me how far it agreed with, and in 25 what points it would be found to differ from, traydrille. Her illustrations were apposite and poignant; and I had the pleasure of sending the substance of them to Mr. Bowles; but I suppose they came too late to be inserted among his ingenious notes upon that author. Quadrille, she has often told me, was her first love; but whist had engaged her maturer esteem. The former, she said, was showy and specious, and likely to allure young perThe uncertainty and quick shifting of partners sons. a 30 thing which the constancy of whist abhors; the dazzling supremacy and regal investiture of Spadille-absurd, as she justly observed, in the pure aristocracy of whist, where his crown and garter give him no proper power above his brother5 nobility of the Aces; - the giddy vanity, so taking to the inexperienced, of playing alone; —above all, the overpowering attractions of a Sans Prendre Vole, to the triumph of which there is certainly nothing parallel or approaching, in the contingencies of whist; - all these, she would say, make quadrille 10 a game of captivation to the young and enthusiastic. But whist was the solider game: that was her word. It was a long meal; not, like quadrille, a feast of snatches. One or two rubbers might co-extend in duration with an evening. They gave time to form rooted friendships, to cultivate steady 15 enmities. She despised the chance-started, capricious, and ever fluctuating alliances of the other. The skirmishes of quadrille, she would say, reminded her of the petty ephemeral embroilments of the little Italian states, depicted by Machiavel; perpetually changing postures and connections; 20 bitter foes to-day, sugared darlings to-morrow; kissing and scratching in a breath; — but the wars of whist were comparable to the long, steady, deep-rooted, rational antipathies of the great French and English nations. A grave simplicity was what she chiefly admired in her 25 favourite game. There was nothing silly in it, like the nob in cribbage nothing superfluous. No flushes that most irrational of all pleas that a reasonable being can set up: that any one should claim four by virtue of holding cards of the same mark and colour, without reference to the playing 30 of the game, or the individual worth or pretensions of the cards themselves! She held this to be a solecism; as pitiful an ambition at cards as alliteration is in authorship. She despised superficiality, and looked deeper than the colours of things. Suits were soldiers, she would say, and must have a uniformity of array to distinguish them: but what should we say to a foolish squire, who should claim a merit from dressing up his tenantry in red jackets that never were to be marshalled never to take the field? - she even wished that whist were more simple than it is; and in my mind, would have stripped 5 it of some appendages, which in the state of human frailty, may be venially, and even commendably, allowed of. She saw no reason for the deciding of the trump by the turn of the card. Why not one suit always trumps? - Why two colours, when the mark of the suits would have sufficiently distinguished 10 them without it? "But the eye, my dear madam, is agreeably refreshed with the variety. Man is not a creature of pure reason - he must have his senses delightfully appealed to. We see it in Roman Catholic countries, where the music and the paintings draw in 15 many to worship, whom your quaker spirit of unsensualizing would have kept out. – You, yourself, have a pretty collection of paintings but confess to me, whether, walking in your gallery at Sandham, among those clear Vandykes, or among the Paul Potters in the ante-room, you ever felt your bosom 20 glow with an elegant delight, at all comparable to that you have it in your power to experience most evenings over a wellarranged assortment of the court cards?the pretty antic habits, like heralds in a procession-the gay triumph-assuring scarlets-the contrasting deadly-killing sables-the 'hoary 25 majesty of spades'- Pam in all his glory! "All these might be dispensed with; and, with their naked names upon the drab pasteboard, the game might go on very well, pictureless. But the beauty of cards would be extinguished for ever. Stripped of all that is imaginative in them, 30 they must degenerate into mere gambling. — Imagine a dull deal-board, or drum head, to spread them on, instead of that nice verdant carpet (next to nature's), fittest arena for those courtly combatants to play their gallant jousts and turneys in! |