spaper, 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 Germ