The English aristocrat, male or female, cared only for
cards, and no noble lady dreamed of remaining long in an assembly
where _piquet_ and _ecarte_ were not going on. The French seigneur
gambled away an estate in an evening; the Russian landowner staked a
hundred serfs and their lives and fortunes on the turn of a card;
little German princelings would play quite cheerfully for regiments of
soldiers. The pictures which we are gradually getting from memoirs and
letters are almost too grotesque for belief, and there is some little
excuse for the hearty optimists who look back with complacency on the
past, and thank their stars that they have escaped from the domain of
evil. For my own part, when I see the mode of life now generally
followed by most of our European aristocracies, I am quite ready to be
grateful for a beneficent change, and I have again and again made
light of the wailings of persons who persist in chattering about the
good old times. But I am talking now about the spirit of the gambler;
and I cannot say that the human propensity to gamble has in any way
died out. Its manifestations may in some respects be more decorous
than they used to be; but the deep, masterful, subtle tendency is
there, and its force is by no means diminished by the advance of a
complicated civilisation.
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