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Thus, though a gamester at heart, he never touched a card, for he considered his position did not allow him as he said "to risk the necessary in the hope of winning the superfluous," yet he would sit for nights together at the card table and follow with feverish anxiety the different turns of the game.

I was told to-night that my Lady Castlemayne is so great a gamester as to have won L5000 in one night, and lost L25,000 in another night, at play, and hath played L1000 and L1500 at a cast. Thence to the Temple, where at Porter's chamber I met Captain Cocke, but lost our labour, our Counsellor not being within, Pemberton, and therefore home and late at my office, and so home to supper and to bed.

What Charms it has! makes the Waiters fly, Boys, and the Master with Cap in Hand excuse what's amiss, Gentlemen Your Worship shall command the best and the rest How briskly the Box and Dice dance, and the ready Money submits to the lucky Gamester, and the gay Wench consults with every Beauty to make her self agreeable to the Man with ready Money!

But for the most reckless among the reckless, for the spendthrift among spendthrifts, for the gamester above all gamesters, and for a gay man outstripping the gay by these characteristics did the world know Lord Mount Severn. It was said his faults were those of his head; that a better heart or a more generous spirit never beat in human form; and there was much truth in this.

Like Uriel and Satan in Paradise Lost, Gustavus and Wallenstein stood opposed to each other. On one side was the enthusiast, on the other the mighty gamester, playing the great game of his life without emotion, by intensity of thought alone. On one side was the crusader, on the other the indifferentist, without faith except in his star.

It was as though, fully armed for his battle of life, he had suddenly been stripped of armour and every weapon, and left naked on the field. But he had the mind of the gamester, and the true gamester's self-control. He had taken chances so often that the tornado of ill-luck left him standing. "What proof have you?" he asked quietly. Soolsby's explicit answer left no ground for doubt.

"Perhaps not, but we may have such a long spell of it that everything is drowned. 'It's a long lane, says the proverb, 'that has no turn; but a man be done up long before he gets to the turning place." The other replied by some of the usual commonplaces by which, in condescending language, the gamester provoked and stimulates his unconscious victim.

"The 'system' was a swindle," hissed Mr. Simp, looking up through red eyes which throbbed like pulses. "What right had you to plunder us upon your speculation?" "The 'system' could not fail," answered the gamester, at bay; "it must have been my manner of play. I think that, upon one run of luck, I gave up my method."

Dorsenne had spoken truly, he loved to comprehend to comprehend as the gamester loves to game, the miser to accumulate money, the ambitious to obtain position there was within him that appetite, that taste, that mania for ideas which makes the scholar and the philosopher.

Until people saw Garrick's Beverley, they didn't think there was anything in the Gamester; nor was there, except what Garrick put there. This is called creating a part, and he is the greatest actor who creates most parts. But genius in the author of the play is a terrible obstacle in the way of an actor who aspires to identify himself once and for all with the leading part in it. Mr.