nervously pencils his race-card never thinks that the time of
weakness and sadness and weariness is coming on; that gray and
tremulous old man who bends over the roulette-table never thinks that
he will speedily drop into a profundity deeper than ever plummet
sounded. The gliding ball does not swing round in its groove faster
than the old man's soul fares towards the darkness; and yet he
clenches his jaw and engages in the most trivial of pursuits as if he
had an eternity before him. The youth and the dotard have alike
succeeded in passing out of themselves, and their very souls will not
return to the body until the delirious spell has ceased to act. All
men alike seem to have, more or less, this craving for oblivion. Long
ago I remember seeing a company of farmers who had come to market in
the prosperous times; they were among the wildest of their set, and
they settled down to cards when business was done. Day after day those
bucolic gentlemen sat on; when one of them lay down on a settle to
snatch a nap, his place was taken by another, and at the end of the
week some of the original company were still in the parlour, having
gambled furiously all the while without ever washing or undressing.
Time was non-existent for them, and their consciousness was exercised
only in watching the faces of the cards and counting up points. But
the dull-witted farmers were quite equalled by the polished scholar,
the great orator, the brilliant wit, Charles Fox. It was nothing to
Fox if he sat for three days and three nights at a stretch over the
board of green cloth. His fortune went; he might lose at the rate of
ten thousand pounds in the twenty-four hours; but he had succeeded in
forgetting himself, and his loss of time and fortune counted as
nothing. The light, careless gipsy shares the disposition of the
matchless orator and the dull farmer. You may see a gipsy enter the
tossing-ring at a fair; he loses all his money, but he goes on staking
everything he possesses, and, if the luck remains adverse, he will
continue tossing until his pony, his cart, his lurcher-dog, his very
clothes are all gone. The Chinaman will play for his life; the Red
Indian recklessly piles all he owns in the world upon the rough heap
of goods which his tribe wager on the result of a pony race. Look
high, look low, and we see that the gamblers actually form the
majority of the world's inhabitants; and we must go among the men of
abstractions--the men who can a