LIGHT COME, LIGHT GO.*
Mn. NEVILL has produced an entertaining, if rather discur- sive, book on a subject which exercises a perennial fascination
over the minds of men. There are some fortunate natures in which the gambling instinct is absolutely non-existent; there are more in which it is sternly repressed, whether from prudential or conscientious considerations, or both ; but with the great bulk of humanity the passion for speculation, in other words, for acquiring wealth without work, is an innate characteristic. Mr. Nevill will be readily acquitted of any propensity to moralise, but the volume before us, with its
shrewd observations and its long list of " shocking examples," should act as a deterrent to those who imagine that the card- table and the racecourse form a quick and easy road to riches. Many of Mr. Nevill's pages might be a prose version of The Vanity of Human Wishes : " then mark what ills the gamester's
path assail." And the author is fully entitled to hope that those who under his guidance have wandered through the gaming-houses of Europe, and surveyed the careers of
most of the chief gamblers of the past, "will do him the justice to admit that he has in no wise sought
to minimise the grave evils which are the almost inevitable result of worshipping the goddess of chance." Nothing, he adds, is more striking than the almost universal ruin which has overtaken the vast majority of gamblers, except the complete failure which has invariably attended all attempts to stamp out this vice by means of coercive measures. Without accepting so sweeping a condemnation of the efforts which have, at any rate, closed the " hells " of our great cities and swept away some of the most offensive plague-spots in the capitals of Europe, the splendours and miseries of the gambler's life are painted by Mr. Nevill in most unalluring colours. We read on one page of the French and Italian prisoners at Dartmoor, who, having gambled away their scanty rations, would stake their clothes, and even their beds, while on the next we have the tragic story of Mr. Darner, who lost forty thousand guineas at tennis, and then blew his brains out at a tavern in Covent Garden, whither he had repaired "with five girls and a blind fiddler." The tragedy was enhanced by the fact that his father's steward was actually on the way
with carte blanche to free the young spendthrift. " Can the walls of Almack's help moralizing," wrote Horace Walpole,
" when L5,000 a year in present and 222,000 in reversion are not sufficient for happiness and cannot check a pistol ?" A gambler of another sort was Elwes the miser, whose passion for gaming was equalled by his avarice, and who contrived to mingle small attempts at saving with pursuits of the most unbounded dissipation :—
" After sitting up a whole night playing for thousands with the most fashionable and profligate men of the time—in ornate and brilliantly lighted saloons, with obsequious waiters attendant upon his call—he would walk out about four in the morning, not towards his home, but into Smithfield, to meet his own cattle, which were coming up to market from Theydon Hall, a farm of his in Essex. There would this same man, forgetful of the scenes he had just left, stand in the cold or rain, haggling with a carcass butcher, for a shilling. Sometimes when the cattle did not arrive he would trudge on in the rain to meet them."
High play had no inconsiderable influence in the social revolution of the eighteenth century, which planted new men on old acres and aided the younger Pitt in his creation of the moneyed Peerage. We should have been glad if Mr. Nevill had elaborated this subject, and traced the substitution of the Lords of the Spinning Jenny for the Earls of Bareacres and Crabs. The remains of Shelley Hall, in Suffolk, which Squire Berridge lost at play, are still standing. "According to tradition he gambled away the house room by room, and when all the contents were gone and the house gutted, he pulled down certain portions and gambled away the bricks." The ghost of Gaudy Brampton still haunts the attic in Blo' Norton Hall, which he lost to a man who married his widow after he had committed suicide.
Mr. Nevill has much to tell us on the subject of games of cards and of hazard, and he has many reflections, with the troth of which we are in complete agreement, on the hopeless- ness of " systems " at the Continental gaming-tables, though he is at pains to explain some of the more specious of them. We ought to be grateful for the information that the roulette wheels at Monte Carlo are perfectly honest machines, but we
• Light Come, Light Go : Gambling—Gamesters—Wagers—the Turf. By Ralph • The Book of Flowers. By Katharine Tynan and Frances Maitland. London: ifevill, With Illnertrations in Colour. London : Macmillan and Co. [l5s. net.] Smith, Elder, and Co. [Ss. net.] cannot resist a thrill of satisfaction on learning how a York- shire mechanic named Jaggers won £80,000 through observing the tendency of the wheels at certain tables to stop in such a manner as to cause a certain group of numbers to have an advantage over the rest. And we like the story of the clergyman of the English church at Monte Carlo, who never gave out any hymns under No. 36, as he had discovered that some of his congregation had made a practice of carefully noting down the numbers with a view to backing them at roulette. The rise of the present popularity of Monte Carlo is said by Mr. Nevill to date from the earthquake of 1887, which gave the place a prominence in the public eye that it had never possessed before ; but its notoriety has completely destroyed its social charm. It is a legend of the rooms that admission was once refused to the late Marquess of Salisbury and his wife on account of their unfashionable attire. On learning of the offhand manner in which the explanations of the distinguished visitors had been received by the janitor, the management tried to make amends by sending them a box for the theatre.
No book on cards would be complete without the legend of " the curse of Scotland "; but Mr. Nevin assures us that the nine of diamonds was so designated north of the Tweed thirty years before the battle of Culloden. It will be news to many that during the Reign of Terror in France a card called the " pouvoir executif " was substituted for the king. This proving too great a mouthful for the habitues of the tripots in the Palais Royal, a new pack was invented in which the king became " Le Genie," the queen " Liberty," the knave "Equality," and the ace "Law," while hearts, clubs, spades, and diamonds were changed into peace, war, art, and commerce. Those who are interested in the legends of the Turf and celebrities will find in these pages much diverting matter, and the illustrations should introduce the work to quarters where "the odds" and the theories of chance are treated with scant consideration.
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