on the contrary, gentlemen were grateful to us for our forbearance, and our character for honour stood unimpeached.  In later times, a vulgar national prejudice has chosen to cast a slur upon the character of men of honour engaged in the profession of play; but I speak of the good old days in Europe, before the cowardice of the French aristocracy (in the shameful Revolution, which served them right) brought discredit and ruin upon our order.  They cry fie now upon men engaged in play; but I should like to know how much more honourable their modes of livelihood are than ours.  The broker of the Exchange who bulls and bears, and buys and sells, and dabbles with lying loans, and trades on State secrets, what is he but a gamester?  The merchant who deals in teas and tallow, is he any better?  His bales of dirty indigo are his dice, his cards come up every year instead of every ten minutes, and the sea is his green table.  You call the profession of the law an honourable one, where a man will lie for any bidder; lie down poverty for the sake of a fee from wealth, lie down right because wrong is in his brief.  You call a doctor an honourable man, a swindling quack, who does not believe in the nostrums which he prescribes, and takes your guinea for whispering in your ear that it is a fine morning; and yet, forsooth, a gallant man who sits him down before the baize and challenges all comers, his money against theirs, his fortune against theirs, is proscribed by your modern moral world.  It is a conspiracy of the middle classes against gentlemen:  it is only the shopkeeper cant which is to go down nowadays.  I say that play was an institution of chivalry:  it has been wrecked, along with other privileges of men of birth.  When Seingalt engaged a man for six-and-thirty hours without leaving the table, do you think he showed no courage?  How have we had the best blood, and the brightest eyes, too, of Europe throbbing round the table, as I and my uncle have held the cards and the bank against some terrible player, who was matching some thousands out of his millions against our all which was there on the baize! when we engaged that daring Alexis Kossloffsky, and won seven thousand louis in a single coup, had we lost, we should have been beggars the next day; when he lost, he was only a village and a few hundred serfs in pawn the worse.  When, at Toeplitz, the Duke of Courland brought fourteen lacqueys, each with four bags of florins, and challenged our bank to play against the sealed bags, what did we ask?  ‘Sir,’ said we, ’we have but eighty thousand florins in bank, or two hundred thousand at three months.  If your Highness’s bags do not contain more than eighty thousand, we will meet you.’  And we did, and after eleven hours’ play, in which our bank was at one time reduced to two hundred and three ducats, we won seventeen thousand florins of him.  Is this not something like boldness? does this profession not require skill, and perseverance, and bravery?  Four crowned heads looked on at the game, and an Imperial princess, when I turned up the ace of hearts and made Paroli, burst into tears.  No man on the European Continent held a higher position than Redmond Barry then; and when the Duke of Courland lost, he was pleased to say that we had won nobly; and so we had, and spent nobly what we won.