Puslapio vaizdai
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act which tends to your own injury; for you had but to use your eyes, in order to avoid this error.' To this observation we received the following answer. 'I was engaged in a dispute about the last round.’— Will not this teach you that disputes are always useless, and that they become prejudicial to your interest when they draw your attention from affairs of greater importance? Another time you will act more prudently.'

"Having said thus much, he finished by making, under the semblance of confidence, a confession which we own filled us with astonishment. 'I knew,' said he, that it was my deal, and it was from mere indifference that I allowed it to be taken from me. This discussion, in which you have made me figure so prominently, I originated, solely in order to furnish myself with an excuse, in the doubt under which I laboured, for ascertaining whether my action was permitted or not.""-pp. 82, 83.

"We conclude these remarks with the following observations :—A player has a right, if he choose, to allow his deal to be taken from him; but never, designedly, to take that of others.”—p. 84.

A hint for a new nomenclature is thus given:

"To phase is to change. We will not swear that this word did not come to us from the moon."-p. 84.

As changing seats is no unwonted practice, would it not be singularly appropriate to speak of each player, not by his name, but his relative position at the table? such as, the beau in the third phase; the dowager in the fourth phase! This delicate allusion to change of place, or principles, might surely be extended to other than club-houses with advantage.

There is a closeness of argument united with a profundity of research in the following passage, that prepares the reader to receive implicitly the astounding novelty of the conclusion:

"An English dictionary has defined a rubber to be a game, revenge, and the whole.' To say the least of it, this is a truly singular definition; it is incomprehensible to us, and we should even say that it is the definition of a person who has never made one at a whist table. This, however, does not astonish us; it is of a piece with what we witness every day, and in every species of business. It is a great chance that a work is confided to one specially devoted to it. This reminds us that in the edition of 1788, of the Dictionary of the French Academy, the definition of the word beefsteak,' is laid down as ' A mutton chop broiled on a gridiron;' and it is still fresh in the recollection of the public, that an exclusive but ruinous railroad undertaking has been recently confided to the management of an individual known only as a man of wit and agreeable manners in society.

"The rubber is the winning of two games out of three; every nation in which the game is played understands the term in this sense. When one game has been won on each side, a third is required to decide the rubber; if, on the contrary, the two games have been won by the same side, the rubber is finished, and a fresh one is commenced.

"This then is what is expressed by the word rubber. Nevertheless, it

would seem to imply something more, otherwise we should not have introduced the word into our language, which is repugnant to the admission of synonymous terms, and which requires a rigorous reform in many of those words which it has admitted."-pp. 105, 106.

These remarks, so entirely homogeneous, and in such perfect accord and harmony, are wound into the following grand diapason, that bursts suddenly, in novelty, on the unexpecting ear.

"A RUBBER MEANS TWO OUT OF THREE CONSECUTIVE GAMES.' "Is it possible!

The more analytico-synthetical style of observation proceeds: "The genius of the English would bestow on every game an existence peculiar to itself, an indentity, which would make it a distinct being, possessing faculties, and the power of developing them; one which should enjoy the privilege of its habeas corpus, duly classed under its proper standard, according to its importance, but always easily recognized. So much for invention. In any other country it would require an effort of the imagination to discover that which in England has been determined by a natural, but gradually improved law, which secures to every man his own sphere of action, which is averse to one individual becoming the slave of another, and which, in the exercise of freedom of opinion, extends its protection even to the brute creation.

"Ye learned compilers, who would persuade us that whist was invented by the Turks, how little are ye acquainted with the principles of the game, who would ascribe its invention to a nation of slaves!"

While the reader is recovering from the prostration of faculties induced by this Salmonean thunder, we take the opportunity of turning over sixty pages at once, for our space warns us to be sparing, and of entreating his slow-reviving intellect to learn wisdom from the remarks we ourselves make in passing, if he has his own improvement at heart.

Whist we have classed with mathematics as an exact science: and the proof of it is, that it always exacts three tricks for a revoke. Upon this act; this sin; this crime against the first principles that bind man to society in the first ages of the world; and that threatens to rupture every link in the great chain of order, that reaches, as M. Cousin has well defined it, " upwards from human nature to the angel, and in a descending scale connects him with the brute,"—as is the case with blind beggars and their dogs-upon this act, disorganizing and consequently demoralizing the world at large, M. Deschappelles is properly and unusually severe, destroying, as it does, what he calls the Golden Age of Whist. He devotes not less than thirty pages to the subject in one place (pp. 165 to 196), and three in another (OF THE REVOKE INSOLIDAIRE: where both parties are not responsible.) We abstain from going at length into the former point, inasmuch

as it will of necessity hereafter be incorporated into the Statutes at Large; but of the latter we must say a few words.

Hints are repeatedly thrown out in the work as to making the one offending party pay the penalty for himself and his partner also in coin. Now as a revoke not unfrequently arises from a player being in jeopardy for the stake, knowing it is the last in his pocket, how, we would ask, when he has not enough for himself, can he be made to pay his partner's share also? The point seems to involve a difficulty, and is apparently deserving of consideration.

Meantime let us observe that a revoke, like Fate, is a necessity : such as the Greek tragedy admitted and inculcated, and Lucretius contended for. Virgil has spoken unreservedly on the very point in question; for he says,

Revocare gradum, hic labor, hoc opus est.

in his own elegant language

Revoking-that's the job-what must be done.

And M. Deschappelles has evidently recognized the principle in his summing up :

"To conclude Necessity has no law,' Infinity of space and time are far beyond human comprehension; but we are nevertheless forced to believe in them, because the contrary would be absurd."

M. Deschappelles however has not explained whether he recognizes the revoke as a moral or a physical necessity. We consider it both. It is moral, because it saves your own money and pockets your adversary's. This requires no demonstration. And the physical it will easily become, as the following considerations show. We consider the punishment should be graduated.

The party revoking should undoubtedly pay the penalty for his partner; but, as money is out of the question, it should be by being condemned to play out the game of PATIENCE, till he has capped all the four suits, under the eye of the partner he has injured and the two adversaries he has wronged, and whose feelings must be hereby fully gratified. A second offence however can admit no palliation; he should then be compelled to pay; or if he really cannot, he ought to commute by-at once, before he goes on with the game, and with the least delay possible-being thrown out of the window; previously pledging himself, however, in return for this indulgence, to come up and conclude the rubber before he attempts to get his bones set.

The justly high reputation of Deschappelles precludes further commendation from us.

ART. VII.—1. Urgata Esaias Nabi. Ascensio Isaia Vatis, opusculum pseudepigraphum, multis abhinc seculis, ut videtur, deperditum, nunc autem apud Ethiopas compertum, et cum Versione Latina Anglicanaque: a Ricardo Laurence, LL.D. Heb. Ling. Prof. Reg. (The Ascension of the Prophet Isaiah; a work attributed to himself; for many centuries. lost, but at length discovered in Abyssinia.) Oxoniæ, 1819. 2. Das buch Henoch, in vollstandiger Uebersetzung, mit fortlaufenden Commentar, &c. (The Book of Enoch, translated entire, with a running Commentary, &c.) Von. Andr. Gottl. Hoffmann, Prof. der Theologie. Jena. 2 vols. 1838.

3. Metsehaf Enoch Nabi. (The Book of Enoch the Prophet, an Apocryphal production, supposed for ages to have been lost, but discovered at the close of the last century in Abyssinia. Now first translated from an Ethiopian MS.in the Bodleian Library.) By Richard Laurence, D.D. Archbishop of Cashel. Oxford. 1838.

THERE is nothing OLD under the sun.

Presumptuous as it may at first seem to attempt this converse to the proposition of the wisest of men-he himself, we are certain, would have been the foremost to lay it down had he lived in the days of present science and discovery. While geographers and historians are exhausting research, and learning and sagacity are hourly tracking the vestiges of the past, and bringing forth from its ample womb, in the guise indeed of antiquity, facts and systems that were most certainly unknown and undreamed of by those to whom they are now attributed ;while from the wreck of ancient materials, ill-digested, and worse understood, but of boundless and still increasing accumulation, a loose mass of rubbish is collected to fill up any how the interior of the piers, set up and smoothly faced by hypothesis as the sole support of those magnificent speculations wherewith metaphysics originally, and of late logic also, have contrived to bridge over the stream of time, and bear the archæologist from shore to shore; and this without wetting even the sole of his feet in the living waters of truth, that flow continually nevertheless, but of course, far beneath his sphere ;while genius and philosophy quote authority only to deny it, and investigate the relics of early ages solely to prove by their existence that they never could have been, and to gather from their mutual consent and coherence irrefragable evidences of their inconsistencies and incongruity;-the reader, we are sure, will join with us in determining by the aid of modern illumination

that antiquity is naught; and he will cheerfully give up all he has been accustomed to regard with respect and reverence,—the testimony of witnesses, the declaration of the actors themselves, the narratives of their immediate descendants, the historical traditions handed down with sacred and filial reverence from age to age, the guides and the belief of those who from proximity of time and country could best appreciate them, to follow the dictum and bow before the reasoning of students, who, living centuries after the means of judging had perished, have, with a fair and impartial ignorance of extinct nations and languages, defined the Past to be simply what the Present chooses to make of it.

Some minds there are, and for this we may thank our universities, who have not been dazzled with the glories of recent illuminations, nor blinded by that excess of light which approximates so nearly to darkness that the Eternal alone can tell any difference between them: minds that,-instead of butterfly rovings only from flower to flower, of coquetting with languages at the rate of one hour for each, and deriving by a photogenic process the exact and faithful impress of every science current in the same street within ten minutes,—are still satisfied to believe that truth can be reached only by a patient study, that reason can be attained only by careful investigation, and that to train the intellect, like the body, for sustained labours and independent energy, long habits of care and study should be formed, enlightened by a slow experience, and exercised with a wide and deliberate judgment and a cautious investigation. They know that the gourd which sprang up in a night, though grateful in the morning, was withered in a day, and they prefer planting the slow growth of the acorn to produce the oak, than see the hurrying pumpkin borne to earth by its trashy fruit. Such minds, and such alone, can afford to be the mock of the scorner they commiserate: for in such minds alone are the conditions of strength and stability, the consciousness of native dignity that asks no shouts from the mob nor the admiring finger of the fool, but leaves to the quacks of the hour the glorifications of noisy applause: the last is the glitter of the moment;--the former is the theme of admiration, the stay of his country's institutions, and the guide, the friend, and the guardian of mankind.

From the difference between the established and the changeable in education, springs necessarily the difference between the intellects so fostered. The man who has patiently viewed the wisdom of antiquity as received both directly and indirectly through the medium of a gradual education, has at least the advantage of that derived experience which the mightiest minds of antiquity, names that have lived in renown for centuries, can afford:

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