world in a chaos of folly; to take from those who could outshine them, all the advantages of mind and body; to withhold youth from its natural pleasures, deprive wit of its influence, and beauty of its charms; to fix those hearts upon money, to which love has hitherto been entitled to sink life into a tedious uniformity, and to allow it no other hopes or fears but those of robbing and of being robbed."*

The apology which is offered is plausible, but by no means sufficient. It furnishes adequate reason why card-playing should be tolerated, and why it should frequently invite the attention of the social circle; it must be evident, however, even to the most superficial observer, that stronger motives than these reasons are able to supply, lead to the amusement. It is sought with avidity, and produces strong excitement. It is the first, and not the last resource of gratification. To it its

*The Rambler, No. 15.

votaries are not driven by necessity, but they are led by inclination. It has a power to fix the attention, and to interest the feelings, beyond almost every other amusement. An almost magical charm attends it, and how protracted soever, it never wearies. It often painfully and injuriously agitates indeed, but it never produces ennui. In short, ingenuity has never invented an amusement so completely absorbing, or that serves more effectually (employing a common phrase) "to kill time." The accurate inquirer, therefore, must search for something more in this amusement than has yet been stated, to account satisfactorily for the remarkable phenomena which it exhibits.

The field they afford for contest appears to be the secret of the interest which games in general create. Contest is a pleasure, rendered so by an instinct of the human mind, namely, the love of power. "The joys of conquest are the joys of man." Triumph is a point of ambition,

and the effort to obtain it, calls the mind into agreeable activity. Proof of superiority, even in trivial efforts, is gratifying. Juvenile recreations illustrate this phenomenon of mind. For the most part they are such as afford scope for contest, and for the trial of superiority. "Almost every game," observes Dr. Thomas Brown, in his lecture on the love of power, "which, in the days of our childhood, amuses or occupies us, is a trial of our strength, agility, or skill, or some of those qualities in which power consists; and we run or wrestle with those, with whom we are, perhaps, in combats of a very different kind, to dispute, in other years, the prize of distinction in the various duties and dignities of life."*

Can the powerful interest which cardplaying produces, be resolved into this feeling? May the love of power, which forms a constant element in the pleasure

* Brown's Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human

of youthful recreations, and which enters into the graver pleasures of "children of a larger growth," be considered the passion to which cards are indebted for their power to engage and to please? The opponent conceives an insuperable obstacle in the way to this conclusion; for cards, he maintains, do not afford sufficient scope for the exercise of this feeling. The trial of mental superiority, is scarcely furnished by the amusement. Efforts of skill only are capable of supplying the description of gratification to which reference is made. The pleasure of success is produced by the consciousness of discovered superiority; that success, therefore, must not be the gift of fortune, but the reward of merit. The stimulus is wanting, when the result of the contest is beyond the control of the competitor; and that triumph is worthless, which chance, rather than skill, commands. It is remarkable how soon games of chance fail to interest children, and how early they are abandoned

for those which involve the trial of per sonal skill and prowess. The infantile gamester must be allowed to play at tetotum or dominos for farthings, otherwise these amusements will soon be abandoned for Fox and Geese, or paper bricks for the mimic castle. If all the games of cards do not exclude skill altogether, they demand it only in a very limited degree. The most admired, and most rational game, requires talent of a very humble order, of which the novice only will be often found destitute. To conceive, therefore, of the card-table as affording, even to the most trivial mind, the kind of gratification, which is found in the display of personal superiority, is scarcely possible. The pleasures of success, on this score, must be less than puerile; the contest is of a nature, which a child learns to despise. This explanation, therefore, of the nature of the amusement, would involve at once an error, in analysis, and a severe reflection on its advocates, many of whom, it must be sup