gem, he succeeded to his father's estate, and then gambled it away.

Aubrey tells a story of him which may help to illustrate the pranks of the period. "Denham," says he, "was generally temperate as to drinking; but one time when he was a student of Lincoln's Inne, having been merry at ye taverne with his comerades, late at night, a frolick came into his head, to get a playsterers brush and a pott of inke, and blott out all the signes between Temple-barre and Charingcrosse, wch made a strange confusion the next day, and 'twas in Terme time. But it happened that they were discovered, and it cost them some moneys. This I had from R. Estcourt, Esq. Yt carried the inke pot."

Any account of Denham's political and diplomatic life would be irrelevant to these pages.

CHAPTER VI.

HAVING finished the last chapter with a description of one rhyming gambler of the court of Charles II., we will begin this chapter with a notice of another, namely that "young man of pregnant parts," as Wood calls him, the Earl of Roscommon. Johnson states that he "learned so much of the dissoluteness of the Court, that he addicted himself immoderately to gaming. This impaired his fortune, and involved him in quarrels in which he is said to have frequently hazarded his life in duels."

There was a great deal of heavy play at the court of Charles II. Shortly after the time at which Rochester joined it, Evelyn wrote: "I saw deepe and prodigious gaming at the Groome-Porters, vast heapes of gold squander'd away in a vaine and profuse manner. This I looked on as a horrid vice and unsuitable in a Christian Court."

There was a good deal of play at hazard, as well as at ombre and at trente et quarante; but the favourite medium for heavy gambling of those times was basset, a game practically the same as

faro. At this game the chances are much in favour of the banker, which may have been the reason why each of the King's mistresses kept a basset-table. The greatest gambler of those times would appear to have been Lady Castlemaine, who is stated to have lost £25,000 at basset in one night and to have been in the habit of staking from £1,000 to £1,500 at a cast.1 Courtin, the French ambassador, stated that at the Duchess of Portsmouth's there were usually three gaming-tables going at once; one for ombre, one for basset, and one for trente et quarante.

Roscommon was a notorious gambler and duellist; but there appear to be no other records against his moral character, and with respect to his poems, Pope wrote that :

in all Charles's days,

Roscommon only boasts unspotted lays.2

Possibly John Milton, who also lived in Charles's days, might have objected to this assertion as too exclusive but doubtless Pope had good reason for passing a general censure upon the poetry of the reign of Charles II.

If Roscommon was the purest poet of Charles's days, it was rather hard upon his memory that his poems should be subsequently published in one

1 Mrs. Jameson's Court Beauties.

2

Roscommon himself wrote, in his Essay on Translated Verse:

"Immodest words admit of no defence:

For want of decency is want of sense".