k of the good old days of Europe, before the cowardice of
the French aristocracy (in the shameful Revolution, which served
them right) brought ruin on our order.... You call a doctor an
honourable man--a swindling quack, who does not believe in the
nostrums which he prescribes, and takes your guinea for whispering
in your ear that it's a fine morning; and yet, forsooth, a gallant
man who sits him down before the baize and challenges all comers,
his money against theirs, his fortune against theirs, is proscribed
by your modern moral world. It is a conspiracy of the middle
classes against gentlemen; it is only the shopkeeper cant which is
to go down nowadays. I say that play was an institution of
chivalry; it has been wrecked along with other privileges of men of
birth.'

Here we have the romance of the gaming-table; and in the same chapter
Barry Lyndon recounts the evil chance that befell him at cards with
two young students, who had never played before:

'As ill luck would have it, they were tipsy, and against tipsiness
I have often found the best calculations of play fail entirely. A
few officers joined; they played in the most perfectly insane way,
and won always.... And in this ignoble way, in a tavern room thick
with tobacco smoke, across a deal table besmeared with beer and
liquor, and to a parcel of hungry subalterns and beardless
students, three of the most skilful and renowned players in Europe
lost seventeen hundred louis. It was like Charles xii. or Richard
Coeur de Lion falling before a petty fortress and an unknown
hand.'

The picture of gamblers in a grimy tavern, the unconscious humour of
Lyndon's heroic lament, the comparison between the cardsharpers'
discomfiture and the fall of mighty warriors, make up a fine example
of Thackeray's eye for graphic detail, and prove the force and temper
of his incisive irony.

Yet, in spite of its great excellence, the book still labours under
the artistic disadvantage of having a rogue for its hero. Thackeray
was too good an artist to be unconscious of this defect, and in a
footnote to page 215 he defends his choice characteristically. After
admitting that Mr. Lyndon maltreated his lady in every possible way,
bullied her, robbed her to spend the money in gambling and taverns,
kept mistresses in her house, and so on, he argues:

'The world contains sco