there were very few bad debts.
On the contrary, gentlemen were grateful to us for our forbearance, and
our character for honour stood unimpeached. In latter times, a vulgar
national prejudice has chosen to cast a slur upon the character of men
of honour engaged in the profession of play; but I speak of the good old
days of Europe, before the cowardice of the French aristocracy (in the
shameful revolution, which served them right) brought discredit upon our
order. They cry fie now upon men engaged in play; but I should like to
know how much more honourable _their_ modes of livelihood are than ours.
The broker of the Exchange, who bulls and bears, and buys and sells, and
dabbles with lying loans, and trades upon state-secrets,--what is he but
a gamester? The merchant who deals in teas and tallow, is he any better?
His bales of dirty indigo are his dice, his cards come up every year
instead of every ten minutes, and the sea is his green-table. You call
the profession of the law an honourable one, where a man will lie for
any bidder;--lie down poverty for the sake of a fee from wealth; lie
down right because wrong is in his brief. You call a doctor an
honourable man,--a swindling quack who does not believe in the nostrums
which he prescribes, and takes your guinea for whispering in your ear
that it is a fine morning. And yet, forsooth, a gallant man, who sits
him down before the baize and challenges all comers, his money against
theirs, his fortune against theirs, is proscribed by your modern moral
world! It is a conspiracy of the middle-class against gentlemen. It is
only the shopkeeper cant which is to go down nowadays. I say that play
was an institution of chivalry. It has been wrecked along with other
privileges of men of birth. When Seingalt engaged a man for
six-and-thirty hours without leaving the table, do you think he showed
no courage? How have we had the best blood and the brightest eyes too,
of Europe throbbing round the table, as I and my uncle have held the
cards and the bank against some terrible player, who was matching some
thousands out of his millions against our all, which was there on the
baize! When we engaged that daring Alexis Kossloffsky, and won seven
thousand louis on a single coup, had we lost we should have been beggars
the next day; when _he_ lost, he was only a village and a few hundred
serfs in pawn the worse. When at Toeplitz the Duke of Courland brought
fourteen lacqueys, each with four bags