Imagine Bull in such a combat, and you have a picture of the most hopeless incapacity. He frets, fumes, storms, and sulks; but what avails it? he is “done” in the end; but he is no more aware that the struggle he has been engaged in is an intellectual one, than was the Bourgeois Gentilhomme conscious that he had been for forty years “talking prose.” The Priest was doubtless the great originator of all this mechanism of secrecy and fraud. For centuries the Church has been the Tyrant of Italy. The whole fate and fortunes of families depended on the will of a poor, ill-clad, ignoble-looking creature, who, though he sat at meals with the master, ate and talked like a menial. To this man was known everything--all that passed beneath the roof. Not alone was he aware of the difficulties, the debts, the embarrassments of the family, but to him were confided their feelings, their shortcomings, their sorrows, and it might be their shame. From him there was nothing secret; and he sat there, in the midst of them, a sort of Fate, wielding the power of one who knew every spring and motive that could stir them, every hope that could thrill, every terror that could appal them. There was no escape from him--cold, impassive spectator of good or evil fortune, without one affection to attach him to life, grimly watching the play of passions which made men his slaves, and only interested by the exercise of a power that degraded them. The layman could not outwit him, it is true, but he could steal something of the craft that he could not rival. This he has done; how he has employed it any one can at least imagine who has had dealings in Italy. THE DECLINE OF WHIST. What is the reason of the decline of Whist? Why is it that every year we find fewer players, and less proficiency in those who play? It is a far graver question than it may seem at first blush, and demands an amount of investigation much deeper than I am able to give it here. Of course I am prepared to hear that people nowadays are too accomplished and too intellectual to be obliged to descend for their pastime to a mere game at cards; that higher topics engage and higher interests occupy them; that they read and reflect more than their fathers and grandfathers did; and that they would look down with disdain upon an intellectual combat where the gladiators might be the last surviving veterans of a bygone century.