anything, yields anything.  A little way in, he cares not how far he wades; the greater his possessions are, the apter he is to take up and to be trusted—­thus gentlemen are ferretted and undone!” It is evident that the whole system turns on the single novice; those who join him in his bonds are stalking horses; the whole was to begin and to end with the single individual, the great coney of the warren.  Such was the nature of those “commodities” to which Massinger and Shakspeare allude, and which the modern dramatist may exhibit in his comedy, and be still sketching after life.

Another scene, closely connected with the present, will complete the picture.  “The Ordinaries” of those days were the lounging places of the men of the town, and the “fantastic gallants,” who herded together.[75] Ordinaries were the “exchange for news,” the echoing places for all sorts of town-talk:  there they might hear of the last new play and poem, and the last fresh widow, who was sighing for some knight to make her a lady; these resorts were attended also “to save charges of housekeeping.”  The reign of James I. is characterised by all the wantonness of prodigality among one class, and all the penuriousness and rapacity in another, which met in the dissolute indolence of a peace of twenty years.  But a more striking feature in these “Ordinaries” showed itself as soon as “the voyder had cleared the table.”  Then began “the shuffling and cutting on one side, and the bones rattling on the other.”  The “Ordinarie,” in fact, was a gambling-house, like those now expressively termed “Hells,” and I doubt if the present “Infernos” exceed the whole diablerie of our ancestors.

In the former scene of sharping they derived their cant terms from a rabbit-warren, but in the present their allusions partly relate to an aviary, and truly the proverb suited them, “of birds of a feather.”  Those who first propose to sit down to play are called the leaders; the ruined gamesters are the forlorn-hope; the great winner is the eagle; a stander-by, who encourages, by little ventures himself, the freshly-imported gallant, who is called the gull, is the wood-pecker; and a monstrous bird of prey, who is always hovering round the table, is the gull-groper, who, at a pinch, is the benevolent Audley of the Ordinary.

There was, besides, one other character of an original cast, apparently the friend of none of the party, and yet in fact, “the Atlas which supported the Ordinarie on his shoulders:”  he was sometimes significantly called the impostor.