The Lake of Wine

The Lake of Wine

Some time in June of the year 1800 (as privately chronicled) there came a famous evening at Whitelaws Club in St. Jamess Street, off Piccadilly, London. There and thenaccording to the unattested evidence of an eyewitnessMr. Ladislaw lost his head, Lord Dunlone his mistress, Sir Robert Linne his fortune, and Major Dalrymple his life. Thus it appears these four were all losers, and each of a material property, save the first, who, alone of the quartette, commuted his self-possession for a very real equivalent in hard cash. Whitelaws in those days ran, of a host of gambling clubs, the deepest. It was there all heavy potations and long stakes (at which many a self-martyr burned); but the first of these were put down and the second up with an accepted solemnity of decorum that was traditional to the place and the sign of its moral endowment. Fox, in his heavier moments, had been known to hazard in its glooms occasionally, and to lose, of course; andequally of courseto find immediate balm for his scorched fingers in the inevitable Herodotus. Selwyn, also, and Topham Beauclerc, and many another Georgium sidus, had played and hiccupped within its pregnant walls; but always with gravity and a weight of personal responsibility towards the foundation. Brookess might have held in its time more showy revelry; Almacks have gambled in broad-brimmed straw hats, bedecked with flowers, and masks to hide the play of emotions. Whitelaws would have none of these. It had ever stood coldly aloof from flash and notoriety, accepting Todds definition of a club as An association of persons subjected to particular rules, rather than that of Johnson (the rendering has a warm personal flavour), who calls it An assembly of good fellows, meeting under certain conditions. From first to last it remained ponderous in self-importance and rigid in exacting the observance of its unwritten codes of conduct. If its gaming operations were large, it desired the company of no feather-brain plungers; but rather of players of substance, to whom cards were a market, not a raffle. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 66415
Author: Capes, Bernard
Release Date: Sep 29, 2021
Format: eBook
Language: English