’That Marquis, who is now familiar grown With every reprobate about the town.... Now, sad transition! all his lordship’s nights Are passed with blacklegs and with parasites.. The rage of gaming and the circling glass Eradicate distinction in each class; For he who scarce a dinner can afford Is equal in importance with my lord.’ This is just what happened when gambling-hells were openly flourishing in London, and what happens now when gambling-clubs abound, and are almost daily raided by the police, when some actually respectable people are found mixed up with the rascaldom which supports these clubs. A perfect mania seems to have seized the lower orders of our day to gamble; but formerly, for instance, in Walpole’s time, in the latter half of the last century, the upper classes were the worst offenders, of which the just-mentioned statesman and epistolary chronicler of small-beer, which, however, by long keeping has acquired a strong and lasting flavour, gives us many proofs. ’Lord Sandwich,’ he reports, ’goes once or twice a week to hunt with the Duke [of Cumberland], and, as the latter has taken a turn of gaming, Sandwich, to make his court—and fortune—carries a box and dice in his pocket; and so they throw a main whenever the hounds are at fault, upon every green hill and under every green tree.’ Five years later, at a magnificent ball and supper at Bedford House, ’the Duke was playing at hazard with a great heap of gold before him. Somebody said he looked like the prodigal son and the fatted calf both.’ Under such circumstances it could not fail that swindlers _par excellence_ sometimes found their way among the royal and noble gamblers. There was a Sir William Burdett, whose name had the honour of being inscribed in the betting-room at White’s as the subject of a wager that he would be the first baronet who would be hanged. He and a lady, ’dressed foreign, as a Princess of the House of Brandenburg,’ cheated Lord Castledurrow (Baron Ashbrook) and Captain Rodney out of a handsome sum at faro. The noble victim met the Baronet at Ranelagh, and addressed him thus: ’Sir William, here is the sum I think I lost last night. Since then I have heard that you are a professed pickpocket, and therefore I desire to have no further acquaintance with you.’ The Baronet took the money with a respectful bow, and then asked his Lordship the further favour to set him down at Buckingham Gate, and without further ceremony jumped into the coach. Walpole writes to Mann, in 1750, that ’Jemmy Lumley last week had a party of whist at his own house: the combatants, Lucy Southwell, that curtseys like a bear, Mrs. Bijean, and Mrs. Mackenzy. They played from six in the evening till twelve next day, Jemmy never winning one rubber, and rising a loser of £2,000.... He fancied himself cheated and would not pay. However, the bear had no share in his evil surmises ... and he promised a dinner at Hampstead to Lucy and her sister.