xcess, is the
most shameful but one that the female world can fall into. The ill
consequences of it are more than can be contained in this paper.
However, that I may proceed in method, I shall consider them, First, as
they relate to the mind; Secondly, as they relate to the body.

4. Could we look into the mind of a female gamester, we should see it
full of nothing but trumps and mattadores. Her slumbers are haunted with
kings, queens, and knaves. The day lies heavy upon her till the
play-season returns, when for half a dozen hours together, all her
faculties are employed in shuffling, cutting, dealing and sorting out a
pack of cards; and no ideas to be discovered in a soul which calls
itself rational, excepting little square figures of painted and spotted
paper.

5. Was the understanding, that divine part in our composition, given for
such an use? Is it thus that we improve the greatest talent human nature
is endowed with? What would a superior being think, were he shewn this
intellectual faculty in a female gamester, and at the same time told,
that it was by this she was distinguished from brutes, and allied to
angels?

6. When our women thus fill their imaginations with pips and counters, I
cannot wonder at the story I have lately heard of a new-born child that
was marked with the five of clubs.

Their passions suffer no less by this practice than their understandings
and imaginations. What hope and fear, joy and anger, sorrow and
discontent, break out all at once in a fair assembly, upon so noble an
occasion as that of turning up a card?

7. Who can consider, without a secret indignation, that all those
affections of the mind which should be consecrated to their children,
husbands and parents, are thus vilely prostituted and thrown away upon a
hand at loo? For my own part, I cannot but be grieved, when I see a fine
woman fretting and bleeding inwardly from such trivial motives: when I
behold the face of an angel, agitated and discomposed by the heart of a
fury.

8. Our minds are of such a make, that they naturally give themselves up
to every diversion which they are much accustomed to, and we always
find, that play, when followed with assiduity, engrosses the whole
woman. She quickly grows uneasy in her own family, takes but little
pleasure in all the domestic innocent endearments of life, and grows
more fond of _Pam_ than of her husband.

9. My friend _Theophrastus_, the best of husbands and of fathers, ha