The Spartan practice of exhibiting the drunken slave to disgust the rising generation with the vice of inebriety, was a doubtful experiment at best—but, in the present case, there can be no doubt at all as to its inapplicability. There is always seen a certain proportion of the fair sex round the gambling-tables—many of them playing with quite as much desperation as the men. It is melancholy to state that, we too often see delicate English females squeezing in between parded Jew and whiskered German, to stake their gold or silver on the gyrations of a ball or the colour of a card! Here is an excellent NORMAL SCHOOL, where the wives, and daughters, and sons of our nobility and gentry can learn the rudiments—“_and something more_”—of heartless vice and headlong dissipation, without reference to sectarian creed, theological faith, or national religion;—while the children of the Protestant peasant and mechanic would be contaminated by the presence of Catholic or Dissenter in the same grammar-school, when acquiring the rudiments of reading and writing! If this be not “straining at gnats and swallowing camels,” I know not what is! And here I may glance at a curious species of one-sided morality strictly enforced by the late Duke of Nassau—the prohibition of gambling in the “CURST-HELLS,” among his own subjects; while free permission is given to all foreigners to rob and plunder each other at roulette and rouge et noir, in the open day—Sundays and Saturdays! When I said _free_ permission, I was wrong. The license to gamble is sold to the bankers of each Cursaal (curst hell) for a large sum—which goes into the ducal treasury. I puzzled my brains, for a long time, in the attempt to discover the _principle_ of this law, and at length found it, as far off as China. The geographers of that country represent the Celestial Empire as occupying nearly the whole of the dry land of this globe—the various other countries of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, being located as small islands dotted in the ocean, and inhabited by BARBARIANS. Now it is clear that the late Duke considered his Duchy of Nassau as the Celestial Empire of Europe, the other nations, as Russia, Prussia, Austria, Italy, Spain, England, America, &c. being mere barbarians, whose morals were not worth preserving—whose souls were not worth saving—and whose gold alone was worth gathering into the royal exchequer at Biberich![16] The young sovereign of Nassau has now a good opportunity of signalizing his accession to power by abolishing the gambling tables of the Cursaals. The income derived from the licensing of “hells” cannot yield good interest here or hereafter. THE ADLER, OR EAGLE BATH.