REVIEW OF THE JEUX DE RÈGLE.

The stand hands at Ecarté are derived from calculations assumed to be sufficient for practical purposes of play. Absolutely precise and correct calculations, however possible, would entail an amount of labour which no one is likely to bestow on a game. A general basis is therefore adopted, and the calculations ca ried out accordingly through the possible combinations of suits in five cards. From reference to the Jeux de Règle numbered, it appears that Cavendish borrowed some hands from a work of that title and the rest, very likely, from Bohn's and THE WESTMINSTER PAPERS. As I am not aware of the basis adopted in the Jeux de Règle or Bohn's, I shall restrict myself to the investigation of hands which appear both in THE WESTMINSTER PAPERS and Cavendish and from want of space must refer the reader to the article and calculations which began in the No. for July, 1875. The first hand calculated is identical with the first of Cavendish and the result stated at 42014 combinations in favour of leader and 23766 against, but the author divides the score in some combinations in which he thinks there is an even chance of winning or losing the trick. To demonstrate that this is impossible against the best play, I record the stand hand :

The combinations in question opposed are either (the lowest possible always in order to make the demonstration more palpable),

闆

or

The play indicated is leader commences with trump, and on dealer taking same opens and continues his two suit (on general principles), the second round of which is trumped, and the third trump being played, the dealer is put to guess which card to keep. Now the first inference to be drawn from the lead is that the leader has three trumps (known to all experienced players), and the simple calculation what are the odds about his two other cards being of one suit, or different suits, shows:-Two cards of same suit, 8x8x3=192; two cards of different suits, 8X7, x3=84, or 16 to 7 against two cards originally dealt being of the same suit, which already implies the necessity of changing. consideration that the aces of the two hands put down as examples against the stand leader loses the vole only in case he has 8 or 9 left in that suit, or one of two 7's in the going calculation it is best for dealer to play for suits being different.

29

Take, for example, similar hand for dealer, but with highest cards in the two suit.

Besides this, taking into hand having passed the others, but from the fore

The play of the dealer, after taking the trump and having passed the King, ought to be regulated by the following computation of chances. Leader has one card in plain suits left, and this may be one of five Hearts, or one of two small Clubs and three small Diamonds, but the probability (stated before) being in favour of different suits, the best chance now is to lead the IO of Diamonds. On this being trumped and trump led, the question which card to keep is decided by the following:The chances of dealer having had originally two Hearts are equal to and that of one Heart and one Club 6 x 2, or 15 to 12 in favour of keeping the 8 of Hearts and discarding the 9 of Clubs; but suppose the Club being the 10 the odds would be 6 to 5 in keeping same.

6X5

2

If on the Heart King the leader plays a higher card than the 8, there can be hardly any doubt about play or discard.

This exhaustive and perhaps tedious analysis is gone into only to show that the best play assumed as one of the conditions of the basis in THE WESTMINSTER PAPERS would involve numerous calculations on both sides, and it would be easier and sufficient for practical purposes to adopt instead the condition that the trick for leader ought to be absolutely made without reference to the play of the dealer.

The number of combinations referred to 9408, the real approximate odds on the hand are only

37310 winning with

56 voles absolute in points

37366 against 28470; besides which the chances in favour of improving the hand would be represented (estimated roughly) at 46 to 3, and this would more than balance the risk of King being taken by the dealer. This point has been overlooked in the calculations of THE WESTMINSTER PAPERS as well as the voles absolute, which make great difference in hands with high cards.

15

THE ÉCARTE LAWS.

To the Editor of THE WESTMINSTER PAPERS.

SIR, -Pursuant to your request, I have carefully studied these laws, and I have come to the conclusion that it would be extremely unwise to adopt the code. I have made inquiries of Ecarté players, and all of them who have read the laws agree with my view, but I think I can supply the most conclusive answer to your question in an extract from the Field of Saturday last, which is as follows:

DUFFER. The adversary marks two, and has the option of a fresh deal. If he stands the deal he draws the superfluous card at random from the offender's hand, and looks at it, and has then the option of playing the hand again or not.

I think I am right in saying that this is an answer to an inquiry respecting écarté. I know of no other game to which the answer can apply, and I venture to say that there is no such penalty in the club code. The conclusion I arrive at is that Cavendish, the editor of the code, and the card editor of the Field, has thus thrown the code overboard. A CLUB PLAYER. [The case referred to is probably this. Dealer has given himself six cards and played without announcing the fact. In this case, according to Bohn's laws, the dealer loses two points. The same rule holds good if elder hand proposes, and cards are given, and the dealer takes a card too many, but we do not think that any rule gives him a right to have a fresh deal, nor can we at the moment see any reason for his desire for a new deal. The offender cannot mark the King if he has it, and if the non-offender gains two points, we fancy he should be satisfied. Moreover he might make three, with a King and three tricks certain, and the chance of the vole. But we cannot recall any authority giving more punishment than the loss of two points for it. It is clear, as our correspondent kindly points out, that no such penalty can be found in the Club code, and if Cavendish means by this decision to aver that the code is unworkable, we are bound to say that the opinion of all the Ecarté players whom we have consulted is unanimous on the point. We solicited the opinions of players in England, Ireland Paris, Vienna, and Nice, and there is a painful unanimity on the subject that this is a signally bad code, and once more we have to complain that under the most auspicious circumstances a committee appears incompetent to settle a code. We have a Whist code, a Piquet code, and an Ecarté code, and it would be difficult to say which is the worst. The Whist code is bad from confusion and omissions. The Piquet code is bad because it bristles with penalties, and also because, like the Ecarté code, the authors took upon themselves powers to which they were not entitled. It was their duty to settle the laws as they found them, but they cannot make laws according to their fancy. If committees think they possess such power as this, it is useless ever to expect success, and we shall never get a workable or satisfactory code. Committees must learn that they have power to codify the law as it stands, and to decide officially any point that is in doubt or dispute, and clear up that doubt to the best of their ability. Then, as we have so often asked before, if they desire to succeed, they must publish the draft and let the public point out the defects in the draft. The committee can then consider any objection that may be raised and decide accordingly. Having sent their code to the world, it is not likely that they will now attempt to revise it, and we are again left in the disagreeable position of being obliged to ignore the result of so much energy and good will in a cause which we have at heart equally with the committee. We think blame is due to Cavendish for his too great readiness to rush into print, and we are sure that the press in general do great harm by the reviews that appear of books like this. If a review of any book-no matter how good or how insignificant-is written by an incompetent hand, the paper in which that review is published will assuredly lose reputation. We do not believe that a single review of this code has appeared in the daily or weekly papers written by one who knows Ecarté, except such as have been written by the gentleman responsible for its production.-ED. W. P.]

LOO.

THE principal difficulty that this game causes is late hours. A time should be fixed for finishing, and should, under no circumstances, be varied. To give a loser a chance is seldom any benefit. He is just as likely to lose more as to win back the money he has lost, and any way he can do that at the next sitting. It is preposterous and absurd to expect men to sit up all night if they have work to do, and it is nearly as stupid when they have nothing to do; but in club play there can be no excuse for breaking such a sensible plan as fixing a time and sticking to it. Each player can say at starting what time he intends to go, or for how long he intends to play. He can make his own conditions as to time, and no one can stop him, and it therefore follows that on playing round games at a club, each player is entitled to retire as and when he pleases, and no one has any right to make

any remark at one going at a time that is inconvenient to any of the other players. In a private party this is somewhat different, and there is no other course open but to fix a time for stopping and sticking to it, and remember the difficulty about being off occurs only late in the evening. If at starting you propose to leave off in three hours, or four, the bulk of the party will be inclined to say two-and-a-half or three-and-a-half. It is, therefore, easy, by taking time by the forelock to arrange that the party should be broken up at a reasonable time.

Those players who indulged in the old-fashioned Loo, two trumps lead the highest, at first sight see nothing but an advantage to the leader, but in this world of ours it is difficult to allow an advantage without somebody else incurring some disadvantage, and so it is in Loo. The hand that is safe in two trumps lead one, is unsafe two trumps lead the highest, but if we are second or third player, or in any position in which we are not last player we have to play a more cautious game than we could play on the old system. As Loo appears from some cause to be revived, and as it is possible that some modern system will be adopted in country circles, we remind the old players of the effect that the change in one card brings about.

DRAMATIC

DRAMATIC NOTES.

The present Easter may be regarded as an illustration of the rapid changes in public taste, for whereas a few years ago this season would have been signalised by the production of light pieces, principally of the opera-bouffe class, we are in 1878 treated to four new dramas, two from the French, one from the German, but still more French in style than the other two, and one of native origin. We should perhaps rather say that this change is an illustration of the ideas of managers as to public taste, for they are apt, like Lord Derby, to charge as fickleness in the public what is weakness in themselves, and presuming that the public give a preference to a foreign policy that is well-conceived and firmly executed, so do they support a theatre where the plays, of whatever kind, are moderately good, where they know the sort of play they are likely to see, and where, above all, the acting is characterised by general merit. Judging from a numerical point of view of the audiences at the Olympic, the Queen's, and the St. James', where three out of the four new dramas are to be seen, the public are of opinion that the conditions just mentioned have not been fulfilled. It is probable that at these three theatres, all of which have suffered from bad luck or bad management, the pieces just brought out have been produced rather as a desperate experiment than from any well-considered determination founded on views as to the public taste; but the experiment must be desperate indeed which is made by means of such plays as Madelaine Morel at the Queen's, Jealousy at the Olympic, and in a less degree, by Such is the Law at the St. James's. The plot of Madelaine Morel is as stale as it is unpleasant, and the play is weakly acted. Jealousy is novel in treatment if not in story, but is quite unsuited to an Olympic audience, and Such is the Law, though fairly well acted, is equally unsuited to the St. James's and carries its condemnation in its avowed purpose to call in question the law against marriage with a deceased wife's sister. On the other hand Proof, the fourth of the new dramas produced this Easter, is a bold and apparently successful attempt to resuscitate the reputation of the Adelphi for strong and well-acted melodrama. It is an adaptation from, or rather a translation of Une Cause Celebre, boasts an ingenious and complicated plot, and has at least four strong female characters, which the Adelphi management has wisely entrusted to as many capable actresses. Each lady has an opportunity for a strong situation at the close of an act, and Miss Moodie, Miss Pateman, Mrs. Bandmann, and Mrs. Arthur Stirling, make the most of the chances thus afforded them. The play, however, is terribly long, and the tedious scene at the end of the fourth act might, with advantage, be shortened, as it is over-subtle in treatment for an Adelphi melo-drama, and is acted in the most lugubrious fashion by Mrs. Bandmann and Mr. Stirling. The lady has lost the fresh and free style which characterised her as Miss Milly Palmer, and Mr. Stirling's gloom is proverbial. The elocution of Mrs. Stirling is, on the contrary, at once polished and forcible, and Mr. Bandmann, whose manner we do not as a rule admire, deserves some praise for his rendering of the ill-used hero.

We are not prepared to agree completely with the dictum that the stage should avoid dealing with social difficulties; but when social difficulties have become political questions, it is perhaps as well for playwrights to let them alone, more especially when they are questions affecting, not the welfare of the community, but the comfort of a few. It is pretty generally known that the deceased wife's sister agitation is kept alive by the efforts of a small band anxious to whitewash their own sins against the present law, and it is clear that the question can never be a burning one, for it involves two necessary conditions, that a man must be a widower, and that his late wife must have had a sister. But be the question great or small, it is hardly fitted for the stage, for the very reason perhaps that managers would like to entertain it, that is, that it treats of delicate relations between the sexes. Once open the theatrical door to these matters, and there would be no limit to the unpleasant discussions introduced; as, for instance, a well-known act in connection with garrison towns, upon which its opponents might found an effective melo-drama. But supposing for a moment that the deceased wife's sister has a right to a place in the drama, the authors of Such is the Law do not help to a solution of the question, by causing their heroine to

be merely the sister of a supposed deceased wife, the wife turning out to have been not a wife. If they had been consistent they would first have depicted the grief and horror of the hero and heroine at finding that they had unwittingly broken the law; then their angry protests against the law which made the heroine a mistress instead of a wife, and deprived their innocent son of his succession to an entailed estate; and lastly, the authors should have made the unhappy victims abandon unjust England and entailed estates, and seek a new home on the sunny shores of New South Wales, where their union would be legitimate and their son would succeed to whatever estate his parent might die possessed of. This, we repeat, would be a consistent treatment of a remote contingency, but Messrs. Tom Taylor and Paul Merritt complicate matters considerably, and ultimately destroy the raison d'être of their title, Such is the Law. Mr. Bellfoy, before marrying the present Mrs. Bellfoy, had previously been married to a woman he had met on the Continent, who behaved badly to him, abandoned him, and subsequently died abroad. He and his present wife do not know, but his cousin the villainous Captain Saxby does know, that the first wife was that sister of the second, whom he himself had years ago lured from her home. Now Mr. and Mrs. Bellfoy do not behave nicely, in that he conceals from her that he had been married before, and she from him that she had a bad sister, and in addition they break the law without knowing it, which is not the case with those who in real life are trying to alter the law. In the second act, Mr. Bellfoy is so far believed to be drowned that a "body" is buried under the supposition that it is his, and Saxby comes out in his true colours, reveals the first marriage to Mrs. Bellfoy, declares that by the law she was no wife, but a mistress, and bids her and her "bastard" depart from Bellfoy manor, to which he is the heir in tail. Having thus demonstrated the woes that may happen when such is the law, the authors proceed to demolish the edifice they have nearly completed by showing that Bellfoy, who has not been drowned, was not really the husband of the first Mrs. Bellfoy, as she was already married, and to Saxby himself. So that the second Mrs. Bellfoy is not the mistress but the wife of Mr. Bellfoy, because the first Mrs. Bellfoy was not his wife but his mistress, and also a bigamist in marrying Bellfoy whilst Saxby was alive. To descend for a moment to slang, it may be said that this is a considerably "mixed state of affairs, and the moral is that whilst the authors have completely missed the law at which they aimed their shafts, they have succeeded in establishing very complicated and unpleasant relations between the leading characters and the deceased person who supplys the motive of the plot. This, however, is no excuse for the strong adjurations in connection with the name of the Deity which abound in the play, and we are glad to see that the Times critic is of opinion that these "not only sound distastefully but are bad in effect: they lose their weight when they become common." We are always pleased when our humble opinions find an echo in higher quarters, for two months ago, in referring to Mr. Gilbert's Ne'er-do- Weel, we wrote that a certain adjuration, when uttered once in a play, at the right moment, might succeed in bringing down the house, but that when used twice or thrice within half an hour, it became not only offensive, but an obvious endeavour to make up for the weakness of the context.

If the Birmingham clergyman who is at present attacking Mr. Irving's late address and denouncing the stage, would make an inspection of our London Easter novelties, he might find materials for his philippics. We have shown what an unpleasant flavour attaches to Such is the law, and the managers of the Queen's and Olympic are, in Madelaine Morel and Jealousy, showing up their own profession in its worst aspects. If we were to take literally the inferences in both plays, we must assume that respectability and the stage are irreconcilable, and the theatres would be better advised in leaving the washing of their dirty linen to Bow Street, and not in doing it indirectly in plays. Madelaine Morel, which is stated to be adapted from the German of Mosenthal, but appears more like a new version of La Traviata is the story of a young woman who is living in Paris, surrounded with every luxury, in the capacity of what the French call a cocotte, her friends and intimates being described as actresses. We learn that her father had long ago, when she was a child, been unjustly dismissed from the service of some noble family, and the present head of the family arrives in Paris to search her out and make tardy reparation. He finds her, resolves to reclaim her and to marry her, and meanwhile takes her home to his mother and sister, who also support the marriage. Goaded however by the taunts of a reformed roué, who is about to marry the hero's sister, she flies back to Paris, and dies of the inevitable fever to slow music and the weeping of the rest of the characters. This play which is full of cant, rant, and vicious sentiment, is produced at the Queen's by Mrs. Rousby, who acts the part of the heroine. In Jealousy, at the Olympic, adapted from Sardou's Andrea, by Mr. Charles Reade, we are treated to the story of a wife who finds that her apparently devoted husband is paying great attention to a danseuse of the Opera at Vienna. The jealous woman penetrates in disguise into the dressing-room of the dancer, and overhears the arrangements made by her husband for accompanying her rival to Bucharest "for a fortnight." In her despair, the wife, as the fatal hour approaches, seeks to keep her husband at home by the most undisguised exhibition of conjugal blandishments, an exhibition stopping just short of the method attributed to Mrs. Aphra Behn. This plan failing, she puts him for an hour or so into a private madhouse, where his cure is as complete as it is sudden. All this would be unpleasant enough if treated after the farcical manner of such plays as The Pink Dominos, but when the audience is asked to regard Jealousy seriously, the play must be regarded as vicious as well as unpleasant. Farce of the grosser French kind has already been promoted to what is called in London farcical comedy, and there it might be left

without being further developed into farcical drama, which is the title most appropriate to Jealousy, Farcically considered, and regarded from a Criterion theatre point of view, the play is in parts funny, and now that the conversation of smoking-rooms is imported into certain weekly journals, such scenes as those we have mentioned as occurring in Jealousy, may not be thought out of place on the Stage. But we venture to think that Mr. Neville has sadly mistaken the tastes of his public, and now that Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Reade are both found unsuited to the Olympic, a revival of the Ticket of Leave Man might mend its fortunes.

Two plays, founded on The Vicar of Wakefield, have lately been produced; the one at the Aquarium being the general adaptation of the story, written some five and twenty years ago by Mr. Tom Taylor; the other, at the Court, being founded by Mr. Wills on a leading incident in the story. Goldsmith's immortal work is and is not suitable for stage purposes. The incidents are comprised within a moderate space of time, and they are easily embodied on the stage. The cottage home life, the fair, and the selling of the horses, the elopement and restoration of Olivia, the arrest for debt, and the final happiness, can one and all be transferred to the stage without difficulty, and involve no frequent change of scene such as is required for the works, for instance, of Mr. Dickens. And Sir William Thornhill, not only in the disguise of Burchell, but afterwards, when, in his own person, he makes everything right, defeating vice, and causing virtue to be triumphant, belongs to the most effective type of character that the stage possesses, and, to our mind, should be the principal character in any dramatised version of The Vicar of Wakefield. But the drawback, and, to many people, a fatal drawback, to any such version, is that the Vicar himself must necessarily be, if not effaced, at least completely shorn of his best attractions. On the stage he must simply take his own share in the proceedings, whilst in the book he is the narrator of the whole story, reflecting and commenting after his own fashion on the adventures and experiences of each personage. The version now being played at the Aquarium faithfully reproduces the incidents we have mentioned, perhaps too faithfully, for the links which should connect them are sometimes wanting. The Vicar, for the reasons just stated, fails to move us deeply; nor is Mr. Farren, a most excellent, but withal a most artificial actor, able to bring out the latent pathos of the character. On the other hand, Mrs. Stirling is seen at her best as Mrs. Primrose, and, in any case, the Vicar and his wife, as seen at the Aquarium, are far superior to the nonentities of Mr. Wills' Olivia. Those who are familiar with the way in which Mr. Wills has turned history upside down in his delineations of Charles I. and II., Cromwell, and Buckingham, with his whitewashing of Jane Shore, and with his alteration of the death of Eugene Aram bycausing that person to expire peacefully on a tombstone instead of being, as he was, hanged on the gallows, can easily understand that he has treated Goldsmith with no greater respect than the history of England. He states that Olivia is founded on an incident in the Vicar of Wakefield, and there is unquestionably no wrong doing in taking an incident from any book and founding a play on it. But if the surroundings of the incident are also taken from the book, they should in all honesty be taken from that part of the book in which the incident occurs, and not from an entirely different and unconnected part. The reader of the story will remember that it is when the vicar and his family are reduced to poverty, when they live in a cottage where one room serves them for parlour and kitchen, that farmer Flamborough associates with them, and Squire Thornhill carrys out his wicked scheme. It is in the highest degree improbable that, had the vicar continued in his previous prosperity, the farmer would have visited him, or the Squire seduced his daughter. And yet Mr. Wills, to serve his own purposes, or those of a fashionable manager, anxious to exhibit æsthetic properties, does not hesitate to show us the vicar in splendour with Flamborough and Thornhill as guests of the house. By this course the very basis of the incident Mr. Wills has founded his play on is surely destroyed. However beautiful may be the sentiments and language which Mr. Wills engrafts on the incident, we cannot think he is justified in turning and twisting history and fiction as he is so constantly doing. It is only a few months ago that Mr. Wills brought out England at Drury Lane, the plot of which he acknowledged to be founded on Peveril of the Peak at the same time claiming the composition to be, in the main, original. But in this case, as in Olivia, the names of the characters were the same as in the book, and are those critics, who have bestowed so much praise on Olivia, prepared, without a protest, to see Mr. Wills take in hand the works of novelists who are not alive to protect themselves, and whilst carefully retaining the names of the personages, alter, suppress and transfer the incidents at his own sweet will? As to the new setting given to Olivia, it is obvious that both Mr. Wills the adapter and Mr. Hare the manager thought that the episode of the heroine would be better set forth with luxurious surroundings than after Goldsmith's own fashion. Accordingly in the first and second acts, we have the exterior and interior of a magnificent vicarage Numberless are the "properties" in each act, and artfully is the dialogue arranged to draw the attention of the audience to them. A silver wedding is introduced into the first act, and children sing a hymn of congratulation. In the second act, there is a spinet of the period, and more singing; and there is also a cuckoo clock, to which the vicar frequently draws attention, forgetting, that when he was Goldsmith and not Wills, he reckoned time by the sun and the cock in his little farmyard. The third act is the interior of an inn, but very different from that road-side public-house drawn by Goldsmith, and the fourth, in which Olivia returns home, is made to fall on Christmas day, thus affording an opportunity for a little more sentiment, whilst the orchestera softly plays "Home, Sweet Home." All this is very pretty and very æsthetic, but utterly unlike Goldsmith, and about as true to nature as a Watteau Shepherdess. The delicate humour in the character of Dr. Primrose, the broad humour in that of his wife, alike disappear, for humour has no place in such a work as