The lease of the Paris authorized gaming houses expired in 1836-7; and the municipality, albeit loath to lose the fat annual revenue, was induced by governmental pressure not to renew it; and it is asserted that from that moment the number of annual suicides in Paris very sensibly decreased. "It is not generally known," as the penny-a-liners say, "that the Rev. Caleb Colton, a clergyman of the Church of England, and the author of "Lacon," a book replete with aphoristic wisdom, blew his brains out in the forest of St Germains, after ruinous losses at Frascati's, at the corner of the Rue Richelieu and the Boulevards, one of the most noted of the _Maisons des Jeux_, and which was afterwards turned into a _restaurant_, and is now a shawl-shop.(71) Just before the revolution of 1848, nearly all the watering-places in the Prusso-Rhenane provinces, and in Bavaria, and Hesse, Nassau, and Baden, contained Kursaals, where gambling was openly carried on. These existed at Aix-la-Chapelle, Baden-Baden, Wiesbaden, Ems, Kissengen, and at Spa, close to the Prussian frontier, in Belgium. It is due to the fierce democrats who revolted against the monarchs of the defunct Holy Alliance, to say that they utterly swept away the gambling-tables in Rhenish-Prussia, and in the Grand Duchy of Baden. Herr Hecker, of the red republican tendencies, and the astounding wide-awake hat, particularly distinguished himself in the latter place by his iconoclastic animosity to _Roulette_ and _Rouge et Noir_. When dynastic "order" was restored the Rhine gaming tables were re-established. The Prussian Government, much to its honour, has since shut up the gambling houses at that resort for decayed nobility and ruined livers, Aix-la-Chapelle. A motion was made in the Federal Diet, sitting at Frankfort, to constrain the smaller governments, in the interest of the Germanic good name generally, to close their _tripots_, and in some measure the Federal authorities succeeded. The only existing continental gaming houses authorized by government are now the two Badens, Spa (of which the lease is nearly expired, and will not be renewed), Monaco (capital of the ridiculous little Italian principality, of which the suzerain is a scion of the house of "Grimaldi"), Malmoe, in Sweden, too remote to do much harm, and HOMBOURG. This last still flourishes greatly, and I am afraid is likely to flourish, though happily in isolation; for, as I have before remarked, the "concession" or privilege of the place has been guaranteed for a long period of years to come by the expectant dynasty of Hesse-Darmstadt. "_C'est fait_," "It is all settled," said the host of the Hotel de France to me, rubbing his hands exultingly when I mentioned the matter. But, _Quis custodiet custodes?_ Hesse-Darmstadt has guaranteed the "administration of Hesse-Hombourg, but who is to guarantee Hesse-Darmstadt? A battalion of French infantry would, it seems to me, make short work of H. D., lease guarantees,