answer, and you are in an instant in possession
of the motive. Now it may be, that, fully
appreciating the intention, and rightfully
estimating all your partner's resources, yet still
the amount of support he expects from you is
not available. Your object is, therefore, at
once to show him that you cannot come up to
his aid, that you are weak in that arm of the
service, and that the order of attack must be
altered.

You were a chief justice a moment back—
you are a general in command now. The adversary
has played, and what a flood of light breaks
in upon you! You perceive immediately the
indication of strength in a certain colour,
consequently, the likelihood of weakness in some
other suit, since Fortune generally deals in
these caprices; and thus thinking, your imagination
soars upward on the speculation of that
strength and that weakness. He has this, but
not that; he wishes for a club; he is afraid of
the diamonds. The fancy thus exercised attains
an ease and pliancy you have not experienced
before, and you see, almost without knowing it,
a pack! Now comes the strong attack—or is it
really strong? Is not that king led out so
boldly a single card? and is this pretended
strength not weakness, a mere bid of the
opposition, which cannot deceive an old habitué of
the Treasury benches? Ah, crafty politician
that you are, how you have detected the clever
bid for popular favour! but you are not to be
the dupe of such an artifice. You are called on
to reply; and now what a demand is suddenly
made upon your memory, not alone for every
card that has been played—that is a slight
effort—but for every motive and impulse that
suggested the play, and where the intention had
met success, where failure; why your partner
discontinued this or persisted in that; from
what cause did he slight that advance, why
seem to encourage that apparent failure. To
your gifts of Lord Campbell, Napier, and
Disraeli, you now add the calculating powers of
a Babbage, all shrouded under the benevolence
of a bishop, and the bland urbanity of a lord in
waiting.

As I must not rob my other and magnum
opus of details of this sort, you will excuse my
pressing this theme any further. I merely
mean, by these few and passing remarks, to call
your attention to the true nature of the game,
and the qualities it requires. If you see by this
that the great player must of necessity be a
man of varied and remarkable gifts, you will
also perceive how, in the deficiency of such
qualities, inferior performers exhibit manifold
traits of this nature, the wants of the
intellectual man being, so to say, eked out and
supplied by the resources of the moral man.
The great artist, perfect and complete, answering
to every demand, ready at any emergency, is a
grand and a very imposing spectacle. He stands
out like some faultless statue that you walk
around with ever-increasing admiration. Still,
in the high exercise of his genius, his true nature
is little revealed, for neither successes elate, nor
reverses surprise him, and he is not the profitable
subject of contemplation.

It is your erring mortal, your whister, "not
too good for human nature's daily food," your
man of weaknesses and frailties, yielding to
temptation here, trustful to rashness there; now
credulous, now doubting; over-confident at one
moment, over-cowardly the next; spendthrift
today, miserly tomorrow; rash with his aces, and
a niggard of some beggarly small trump, that
might have spared his partner an "honour."
This is the man for our purpose; watch him,
mark him, even for one rubber, and you'll know
more of his real innate actual nature than his
wife knows, who has been solacing and scolding
him for five-and-twenty years. Look at the
very manual indecision with which he extricates
that card from his hand, and seems, even as he
plays, half to recal it. Mark how his eyes
follow—it his own card—not the adversary's,
nor his partner's, but his own blessed four of
spades, and a worthless adventure, of no value
to any one, but a whole argosie to him, for it
was once his, and he played it. That man's heart
is all selfishness. I know it. I see it. You
may argue till you are blue, but you'll not
persuade me to the contrary. Place him in a
cabinet to-morrow, and he'll only have a thought
for the measure he initiates himself—a measure
probably of equal pretension with his four of
spades. He is a one-idea'd creature, and the one
idea is himself. "Who led that card? How is
all this? What's to play?" exclaims the sandy
eyebrowed man, with the long upper lip, and
you see one who is always asking his way in life:
begging this man to explain that leader in the
Times, and beseeching every one to guide him
somewhere. He is a bore, too, of that terrible
category, the lackadaisical, making physical
cold-bloodedness stand for breeding, and thinking
himself the pink of fashion when supremely
impertinent. Well, he'll meet his reward from
that sharp-nosed old gentleman with the
upstanding hair, and who has just turned the
trick, as he would turn the key on a prisoner.
Watch the unrelenting severity of that wicked
old face as he leads out his trumps. Wouldn't
he burn heretics! Wouldn't he thrash his
nigger, think ye! No, he'll not leave you one—
not one, sir; his memory has not begun to fail
him yet, and he remembers you have the ten,
though you have just played the knave. There
is a savage sort of haste, too, in the way he
gathers up the tricks—he is afraid your sufferings
might have even a second's respite. And
oh, poor benighted little man with the large
cravat and the mosaic pin, what possessed you
to keep all your good cards to be trumped, holding
back your notes till the bank broke? You
were a miser, that's the secret of it, and you
thought to carry off your wealth with you at last.
At all events, you couldn't part with it. It was
so pleasant to turn it over and look at it, and
mutter, "Oh, I could make a show if I would;
but I won't. I'll leave it to those silly fools
there to squander their substance; but I'll die
rich!"