About 1737, Hoyle's 'Treatise on Whist' was first published. The work, which seems to have been admirably adapted to the wants of society at the time, was most favorably received; and in the course of the succeeding ten or twelve years it ran through as many editions as Lindley Murray's Grammar, in the same period, in modern times. It proved a "lucky hit," both for the author and the publisher, who took every precaution to secure their copyright: injunctions were held up _in terrorem_ against pirates; and purchasers were informed that no copies of the work were genuine unless they bore the signatures of [Illustration: Signature of Edmond Hoyle.] AND [Illustration: Signature of Tho. Osborne] The race of "Wits," who had previously exercised no small influence on the world of fashion, was then on the decline; the beau-monde had acquired the ascendency over Grub street; and gentlemen of rank and fashion formed themselves into clubs, for the purposes of gaming and social intercourse, from which thread-bare poets and hack pamphleteers were excluded by the very terms of subscription, to say nothing of the preliminary ordeal of the ballot. Those were the golden days of Beau Nash; when George the Second was king; and his son, the Duke of Cumberland, the patron of Broughton and Figg; when Cibber was Poet-Laureate, and when Quin's brutality passed for wit; when the Guards, the pride of the army, were such heroes as we see them in Hogarth's March to Finchley; and when such statesmen as Bubb Doddington had the entrée, by the back stairs, both at Leicester House and St. James's. Even those who professed to correct the vices of the age seem in some degree to have been infected with its spirit; Richardson, the novelist, writing with the ostensible design of reforming "Rakes" and retaining innocent young women in the paths of virtue, seems often to indulge, more especially in Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe, in describing scenes and suggesting circumstances which only could have been conceived by a prurient imagination; and even John Wesley appears to have encouraged his poor converted sinners to exaggerate their petty vices, when speaking their experience at a love-feast, and to dwell, with a peculiar kind of complacency, on their former state of carnal wickedness as compared with their present state of spiritual grace,--just as William Huntington, S.S., when in the fulness of sanctity, dwelt on the memory of his former backslidings, and told all the world, with ill-dissembled pride, that his first-born love-begotten son was an exact copy of his father, both in humour and in person.