of cards as the regular and natural destiny of his countrywomen,-what they all come to at last. This is one of the effects of their general irreligion. When I have seen a palsied old woman nodding over these Devil's-books, as the puritans call them, I could not but think how much better her withered and trembling hands would be employed in telling a bead-string, than in sorting clubs and spades; and it has given me melancholy thoughts, to think that the human being whom I beheld there with one foot in the grave, had probably never a serious thought upon any other subject. The more rigid dissenters, and especially the Quakers, proscribe cards altogether; some of the old church people, on the contrary, seem to ascribe a sort of sacredness to this method of amusement, and think that a Christmas-day cannot be duly celebrated without it. But a general and unaccountable prejudice prevails against the use of them on Sundays. I believe that half the people of England think it the very essence of sabbath-breaking.

Nothing is taxed more heavily than cards and dice, avowedly for the purpose of discouraging gambling. Yet the lottery is one of the regular Ways and Means of government; and as men will gamble, in some shape or other, it should seem that the wisest thing a Government can do, is to encourage that mode of gambling which is most advantageous to itself, and least mischievous to the people. If cards were lightly taxed, so as to be sold as cheaply here as they are in our country, the amusement would, as with us, descend to the lowest class of society, and the consumption be increased in proportion. The revenue would be no loser, and the people would be benefited, inasmuch as some little degree of reflection is necessary to most games; and for those who now never think at all, it would be advancing a step in intellect and civilization, to think at their sports. Besides this, cards are favourable to habits of domestication, and the mechanic would not so often spend his evenings in the chimney corner of the alehouse, if he

could have this amusement by his own fire-side.

All the insignia of taxation are conferred upon the ace of spades, which is girt with the garter, encircled with laurels, and surmounted with the crown, the king's name above, and his motto beneath ; but under all, and over all, and around all, you read every where "sixpence, additional duty!" which said sixpences have been laid on so often, that having no room for their increase upon the card, they now ornament the wrapper in which the pack is sold with stamps. Once in a farm

house where cards were so seldom used that a pack lasted half a century, I saw an ace of spades, plain like the other aves: they told me it was always made so in former times, a proof that when it was chosen to bear these badges of burthensome distinction, quadrille, or some one of its family, was the fashionable game.

LETTER LX.

Growth of the Commercial Interest.-Family Pride almost extinct.- Effect of heavy Taxation.-Titles indiscriminateby granted.-Increase of the House of

Peers.

THE Commercial system has long been undermining the distinction of ranks in society, and introducing a worse distinction in its stead. Mushrooms are every day starting up from the dunghill of trade, nobody knows how, and family pride is therefore become a common subject of ridicule in England; the theatres make it the object of a safe jest, sure to find applause from the multitude, who are ever

possess; and authors, who are to themselves, as one of their own number says, "A whole Welsh genealogy alone,"

continue to attack as a prejudice a feeling, which, as philosophers, it is now time for them to defend. That the new gentry of the country should join in this ridicule ought not to be wondered at. He who has no paternal oaks has reason to prefer the poplars of his own planting, and may well like to expatiate upon the inconvenience of an old family house, long galleries, huge halls, and windows which none but the assessor can count, in his own villa, which is built to the pattern of the last tax upon light, and where the stucco upon the walls is hardly dry. But that the true gentlemen of England should so readily yield up their own precedency to vulgar opinion is indeed extraordinary. Nothing, however, is now valued for being old. The windows and the whole front of the mansion must