ur gracious queen: let generous pity inspire your
souls, and move you to intercede with your noble consorts for redress in
this injurious affair. Who can deny when you become suitors? and who
knows but at your request a bill may be brought into the house to
regulate these abuses? The cause is a noble and a common one, and ought
to be espoused by every lady who would claim the least title to virtue
or compassion. I am sure no honest member in either honourable house
will be against so reasonable a bill; the business is for some
public-spirited patriot to break the ice by bringing it into the house,
and I dare lay my life it passes.

I must beg my reader's indulgence, being the most immethodical writer
imaginable. It is true I lay down a scheme, but fancy is so fertile I
often start fresh hints, and cannot but pursue them; pardon therefore,
kind reader, my digressive way of writing, and let the subject, not the
style or method, engage thy attention.

Return we, therefore, to complain of destructive gaming-houses, the bane
of our youth, and ruin of our children and servants.

This is the most unprofitable evil upon earth, for it only tends to
alienate the proper current of specie, to maintain a pack of idle
sharping rascals, and beggar unwary gentlemen and traders.

I take the itch of gaming to be the most pernicious of vices, it is a
kind of avaricious madness; and if people have not sense to command
themselves by reason, they ought to be restrained by law; nor suffered
to ruin themselves and families, to enrich a crew of sharpers.

There is no playing on the square with these villains; they are sure to
cheat you, either by sleight of hand, confederacy, or false dice, &c.;
they have so much the odds of their infatuated bubbles, that they might
safely play a guinea to a shilling, and yet be sure of winning. This is
but genteel pocket picking, or felony with another name, and yet, so
fond are we of it, that from the footboy to the lord, all must have a
touch of gaming; and there are sharpers of different stations and
denominations, from Southwark-fair to the groom porters. Shame, that
gentlemen should suffer every scoundrel to mix with them for gaming
sake! And equal shame, that honest laborious tradesmen should be
obstructed in crossing the public streets, by the gilt chariots of
vagabond gamesters; who now infest the land, and brave even our nobility
and gentry with their own money.

But the most barbarous part of t