"And all the men and women merely _players_." Illustrative of this view of human life, a couple of pertinent quotations, from Terence and Plutarch, are supplied by another brother of the same craft, M. C. Leber.[2] According to Père Daniel,[3]--a reverend father of the order of Jesuits, who wrote an elaborate history of the French Military Establishments,--the game of Piquet is symbolic, allegorical, military, political, and historical, and contains a number of important maxims relating to war and government. Now, granting, for the sake of argument, that the game, with respect to its esoteric principles, is really enigmatic, it may be fairly denied that Père Daniel has succeeded in explaining it correctly; his fancied discoveries may be examined in detail, and shown, with very little trouble, to be the mere seethings of his own working imagination; others may be proposed, and, as a matter of course, supported by authorities, ancient and modern, on the origin, use, and meaning of symbols and allegories, and illustrated with maxims of war and state policy, carefully selected from the bulletins, memoirs, and diplomatic correspondence of the great military chiefs and statesmen of all nations: thus a respectable volume--in point of size at least--might be got up on the subject of Piquet alone, without trenching on the wide field of cards in general. Court de Gebelin,[4] a Gnostic, at least in the philosophic, if not in the religious, sense of the word, finds in the old Italian Tarocchi cards the vestiges of the learning of the ancient Egyptians, somewhat mutilated and disguised, indeed, by Gothic ignorance, which suspected not the profound knowledge concealed in its playthings, but still intelligible to the penetrating genius which initiates itself into all ancient mysteries, is fond of exploring the profoundly obscure, and becomes oracular, talking confidently of what it _sees_, when it is only groping in the dark. Court de Gebelin's theory suggests at once a general history of science and art, which, as everybody knows, had their cradle in ancient Egypt, and induces dim, but glorious visions of the ancient Egyptian kings,--Sesonch, Rameses, and Amonoph: the chronologers, Sanchoniathon, Manetho, and Berosus, follow, as a matter of course, whether originally known from Bishop Cumberland, or from Mr. Jenkinson, in the 'Vicar of Wakefield.' Then who can think of the knowledge of the ancient Egyptians, and of its essence being contained in the symbolic characters of a pack of cards, without hieroglyphic writing coming into his mind?[5] and this subject, being once started, leads naturally, in chronological order, to Clemens Alexandrinus, Horapollo, Athanasius Kircher, Bishop Warburton, Dr. Thomas Young, and Mons. Champollion. To write properly a history of Playing Cards in connexion with the learning of the Egyptians, as suggested by the dissertation of Court de Gebelin, would require the unwearied energy of