A CLEAR fire, a hearth, and the rigour of the game." This was the celebrated wish of old Sarah Battle (now with God) who, o her devotions, loved a good game at whist. She was none of your lukewarm gamesters, your half and half who have no obje to take a hand, if you want oo make up a rubber: who affirm that they have no pleasure in winning; that they like to win one game, and lose ahat they while away an hour very agreeably at a card-table, but are indifferent whether they play or no; and will desire an adversary, who has slipt a wrong card, to take it up and lay ahese insufferable triflers are the curse of a table. One of these flies will spoil a whole pot. Of such it may be said, that they do not play at cards, but only play at playing at them.
Battle was none of that breed. She detested them, as I do, from her heart and soul; and would not, save upon a striking emergency, willingly seat herself at the same table with them. She loved a thh-paced partner, a determined enemy. She took, and gave, no cessions. She hated favours. She never made a revoke, nor ever passed it over in her adversary without exag the utmost forfeiture. She fought a good fight: cut and thrust. She held not her good sword (her cards) "like a dancer." She sate bolt upright; aher showed you her cards, nor desired to see ours. All people have their b]ind side -- their superstitions: and I have heard her declare, uhe rose, that Hearts was her favourite suit.
I never in my life -- and I knew Sarah Battle many of the best years of it -- saw her take out her snuff-box when it was her turn to play: or snuff a dle in the middle of a game; for a servant, till it was fairly over. She never introduced, or ived at, miscellaneous versation during its process. As she emphatically observed, cards were cards: and if I ever saw unmingled distaste in her fine last-tury te was at the airs of a youleman of a literary turn, who had been with difficulty persuaded to take a hand, and who, in his excess of dour, declared, that he thought there was no harm in unbending the mind now and then, after serious studies, in recreations of that kind! She could not hear to have her noble occupation, to which she wound up her faculties, sidered in that light . It was her business, her duty, the thing she came into the world to do, -- and she did it. She u her mind afterwards -- over a book.
Pope was her favourite author: his Rape of the Lock her favourite work. She once did me the favour to play over with me (with the cards) his celebrated game of Ombre in that poem; and to explain to me how far it agreed with, and in oints it would be found to differ from, tradrille. Her illustrations were apposite and poignant; and I had the pleasure of sending the substance of them to Mr. Bowles: but I suppose they came too late to be ied among his ingenious notes upon that author.
Quadrille, she has often told me, was her first love; but whist had engaged her maturer esteem. The former, she said, was showy and specious, and likely to allure young persons. The uainty and quick shifting of partners -- a thing which the stancy of whist abhors -- the dazzling supremad regal iure of Spadille -- absurd as she justly observed, in the pure aristocracy of whist, where and garter give him no proper power above his brother-nobility of the Aces; -- the giddy vanity, so taking to the inexperienced, of playing alone --above all, the overp attras of a Sans Prendre Vole, -- to the triumph of whic