y.

The poet Voiture was the delight of his contemporaries, conspicuous as
he was for the most exquisite polish and inexhaustible wit; but he was
also one of the most desperate gamesters of his time. Like Rotrou, he
mistrusted his folly, and sometimes refrained. 'I have discovered,'
he once wrote to a friend, 'as well as Aristotle, that there is no
beatitude in play; and in fact I have given over gambling; it is now
seven months since I played--which is very important news, and which I
forgot to tell you.' He would have died rich had he always refrained.
His relapses were terrible; one night he lost fifteen hundred pistoles
(about L750).

The list of foreign poets ruined by gambling might be extended; whilst,
on the other hand, it is impossible, I believe, to quote a single
instance of the kind among the poets of England,--perhaps because very
few of them had anything to lose. The reader will probably remember Dr
Johnson's exclamation on hearing of the large debt left unpaid by poor
Goldsmith at his death--'Was ever poet so trusted before!'...

The great philosophers Montaigne and Descartes, seduced at an early age
by the allurements of gambling, managed at length to overcome the evil,
presenting examples of reformation--which proves that this mania is not
absolutely incurable. Descartes became a gamester in his seventeenth
year; but it is said that the combinations of cards, or the doctrine of
probabilities, interested him more than his winnings.(107)

(107) Hist. des Philos. Modernes: _Descartes_.

The celebrated Cardan, one of the most universal and most eccentric
geniuses of his age, declares in his autobiography, that the rage for
gambling long entailed upon him the loss of reputation and fortune,
and that it retarded his progress in the sciences. 'Nothing,' says he,
'could justify me, unless it was that my love of gaming was less than my
horror of privation.' A very bad excuse, indeed; but Cardan reformed and
ceased to be a gambler.

Three of the greatest geniuses of England--Lords Halifax, Anglesey, and
Shaftesbury--were gamblers; and Locke tells a very funny story about
one of their gambling bouts. This philosopher, who neglected nothing,
however eccentric, that had any relation to the working of the human
understanding, happened to be present while my Lords Halifax, Anglesey,
and Shaftesbury were playing, and had the patience to write down, word
for word, all their discordant utterances during the pha