Pope has assigned to those women who neither toil or spin, “an old age of cards,” after “a youth of pleasure.” This perhaps is not now so generally the course of female life, in a certain class and under certain circumstances, as it was in his days and in the Doctor's. The Doctor, certainly was of opinion that if the senescent spinsters and dowagers within the circle of his little world, had not their cards as duly as their food, many of them would have taken to something worse in their stead. They would have sought for the excitement which they now found at the whist or quadrille table, from the bottle, or at the Methodist Meeting. In some way or other, spiritual or spirituous they must have had it;[1] and the more scandalous of these ways was not always that which would occasion the greatest domestic discomfort, or lead to the most injurious consequences. Others would have applied to him for relief from maladies which by whatever names they might be called, were neither more nor less than the effect of that _tædium vitæ_ which besets those who having no necessary employment have not devised any for themselves. And when he regarded the question in this light he almost doubted whether the invention of cards had not been more beneficial than injurious to mankind. [Footnote 1: It happened during one of the lamented Southey's visits here at the Vicarage, West-Tarring, that a cargo of spirits was run close by. His remark was—“Better spirituous smuggling than spiritual pride.”] It was not with an unkind or uncharitable feeling, still less with a contemptuous one that Anne Seward mentioning the death of a lady “long invalid and far advanced in life,” described her as “a civil social being, whose care was never to offend; who had the spirit of a gentlewoman in never doing a mean thing, whose mite was never withheld from the poor; and whose inferiority of understanding and knowledge found sanctuary at the card-table, that universal leveller of intellectual distinctions.” Let not such persons be despised in the pride of intellect! Let them not be condemned in the pride of self righteousness! “Our law,” says the Puritan Matthew Mead, “supposes all to be of some calling, not only men but women, and the young ladies too; and therefore it calls them during their virgin state spinsters. But alas, the viciousness and degeneracy of this age hath forfeited the title. Many can _card_, but few can spin; and therefore you may write them _carders_, _dancers_, _painters_, _ranters_, _spenders_, rather than spinsters. Industry is worn out by pride and delicacy; the comb and the looking-glass possess the place and the hours of the spindle and the distaff; and their great business is to curl the locks, instead of twisting wool and flax. So that both male and females are prepared for all ill impressions by the mischief of an idle education.”