Comic Sketches and Recollections Author:John Poole General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1843 Original Publisher: H. Colburn Subjects: English wit and humor History / General Humor / General Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Literary Criticism / Humor Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no il... more »lustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: ANECDOTES OF GAMING. PRECEDED BY 3 £trmon ON THE FATAL CONSEQUENCES OF GAMING. In the 3rd Act of the Merry Wives of Windsor, and in the 1st Scene, it is thus written: -- " Keep a gamester from the dice and it it wonderful." And there is my Sermon on the Fatal Consequences of Gaming! It is not often that I presume to be didactic, but " There is a time for all things," saith the proverb. And, surely, time cannot be more apt for the publication of a discourse on this grave subject -- and I trust that with becoming gravity I have treated it -- than now when, by the most remote of all possibilities, it may be useful. Reader, I have a friend who is labouring under the most extraordinary infatuation that ever conquered the mind of man. I '11 tell you what it is. He goes, night after night, to Westminster Bridge, carrying with him a large bag full of sovereigns. There, at the centre arch, where the river is deepest, he takes his stand, and deliberately drops his sovereigns into the water : first, one by one; then, two by two; then, five by five; and so on, gradually increasing, till he has given all his money to the Thames' flounders ! Having duly executed this wise and wonderful ma- noauvre, and waited a certain time in expectation of the re-ascension of his sovereigns, each with a hundred followers in its train (which reasonable expectation, it is needless to add, is rarely fulfilled), he, with a burning brow, ...« less