Coquillart, a poet of the 15th century, famous for his satirical verses against women, died of grief after having ruined himself by gaming. The great painter Guido--and a painter is certainly a poet--was another example. By nature gentle and honourable, he might have been the most fortunate of men if the demon of gambling had not poisoned his existence, the end of which was truly wretched. Rotrou, the acknowledged master of Corneille, hurried his poetical effusions in order to raise money for gambling. This man of genius was but a spoilt child in the matter of play. He once received two or three hundred _louis_, and mistrusting himself, went and hid them under some vine-branches, in order not to gamble all away at once. Vain precaution! On the following night his bag was empty. The poet Voiture was the delight of his contemporaries, conspicuous as he was for the most exquisite polish and inexhaustible wit; but he was also one of the most desperate gamesters of his time. Like Rotrou, he mistrusted his folly, and sometimes refrained. 'I have discovered,' he once wrote to a friend, 'as well as Aristotle, that there is no beatitude in play; and in fact I have given over gambling; it is now seven months since I played--which is very important news, and which I forgot to tell you.' He would have died rich had he always refrained. His relapses were terrible; one night he lost fifteen hundred pistoles (about L750). The list of foreign poets ruined by gambling might be extended; whilst, on the other hand, it is impossible, I believe, to quote a single instance of the kind among the poets of England,--perhaps because very few of them had anything to lose. The reader will probably remember Dr Johnson's exclamation on hearing of the large debt left unpaid by poor Goldsmith at his death--'Was ever poet so trusted before!'... The great philosophers Montaigne and Descartes, seduced at an early age by the allurements of gambling, managed at length to overcome the evil, presenting examples of reformation--which proves that this mania is not absolutely incurable. Descartes became a gamester in his seventeenth year; but it is said that the combinations of cards, or the doctrine of probabilities, interested him more than his winnings.(107) (107) Hist. des Philos. Modernes: _Descartes_. The celebrated Cardan, one of the most universal and most eccentric geniuses of his age, declares in his autobiography, that the rage for gambling long entailed upon him the loss of reputation and fortune, and that it retarded his progress in the sciences. 'Nothing,' says he, 'could justify me, unless it was that my love of gaming was less than my horror of privation.' A very bad excuse, indeed; but Cardan reformed and ceased to be a gambler.