It is said that professed card-sharpers take
season-tickets on all the lines, and that a great DEAL of money
is made by the gentry by duping unwary travellers into a game or
by betting.
[60] King James, the British Solomon, although he could not
'abide' tobacco, and denounced it in a furious 'Counterblaste,'
could not 'utterly condemn' play, or, as he calls it, 'fitting
house-pastimes.' 'I will not,' he says, 'agree in forbidding
cards, dice, and other like games of Hazard,' and enters into an
argument for his opinion, which is scarcely worth quoting. See
Basilicon Doron--a prodigy of royal fatuity--but the perfect
'exponent' of the characteristics of the Stuart royal race in
England.
There is no reason to suppose that the fondness for this
diversion abated, except during the short 'trump or triumph of
the fanatic suit'--in the hard times of Old Oliver--when
undoubtedly cards were styled 'the devil's books.' But, indeed,
by that time they had become an engine of much fraud and
destruction; so that one of the early acts of Charles II.'s reign
inflicted large penalties on those who should use cards for
fraudulent purposes.
'Primero was the fashionable game at the court of England during
the Tudor dynasty.
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