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

sided, where the glow of sentiment is kindled, and the sweet toned chords of hearts in unison awakened their music, where the furnished intellect might throw open its stores of intelligence and feeling, and where, in "the feast of reason and the flow of soul," the mind would receive instruction and pleasure, and the heart sensibility and polish, however insignificant, or even contemptible the amusement itself, its advocate would then be furnished with powerful, if not irresistible arguments for its support. The fact, however, has already appeared, that card-playing cannot plead these advantages. Trivial as is the amusement, it requires the closest attention, and most entire abstraction of mind. Every step in the progress of the game, demands the utmost vigilance, and the slighest degree of inattention might endanger success. An ignorant spectator of the cardtable might be led to imagine, that the interest excited is similar to that, which the mathematician derives from a beautiful but difficult problem of Euclid, and he

would probably find it not easy to persuade himself, that "a trifle light as air," is all that occupies and amuses the interesting group which he beholds, where all is gravity, attention, and silence, scarcely relieved by a single sally of wit, a smile of gaiety, or a glance of kindred and tender thought;-where the fascinations of taste, of grace, and of beauty, cease to be felt ;-where fair brows are shaded by sombre thought, and bright eyes are chilled by cold abstraction, and where all that is beautiful, and lovely, and gay, is bound, as by the spell of some unholy enchantment, in sadness and silence, in coldness and lifelessness.

The blood the virgin's cheek forsook,

A livid paleness spreads o'er all her look;
She sees, and trembles at the approaching ill,
Just in the jaws of ruin and Codille.*

What, then, is the attendant circumstance, which gives to the amusement its

Pope's Rape of the Lock.

singular attraction? Is it the pecuniary considerations which the game involves? It must be admitted, that card-playing is capable of supplying a channel for the flow of mercenary feeling. Money is almost invariably staked at the card-table, and every candid votary of the pleasure will acknowledge, that, without this concomitant, the amusement would, with most persons; lose entirely its power to interest. The advocate of the card-table ascribes this circumstance to custom, whose influence is so powerful, as well in our recreations as in the more serious occupations of life. This explanation, however, is by no means satisfactory to his opponent; for if the use of money in the game were a mere arbitrary appendage, which custom had affixed, surely, in some instances at least, an effort would be made for its removal; since the fact is generally admitted, that this concomitant is an evil. The uniformity of the practice, its universality, from the highest to the lowest classes of society, in opposition to the obvious and