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A great excitement of daily life was the lottery; there were several of these and the most important (authorized 1709) was run by the State; the prizes offered by this often amounted to nearly forty thousand pounds.

Gambling of one kind or another was universal and unrestricted; it filled all ranks of life with black uncertainty; the possibility of ruin, sudden and unexpected, was in every home, cards led to cheating, quarrelling, duelling, murder, suicide.

This last crime rose to appalling frequency towards the middle of the century; neither the ignominy of burial with stake through the breast on the common highway, nor fear of the hell threatened by the Church, could prevent those excited by drink, ruined by vice, exhausted by self-indulgence, tortured by disease and the horrors about them, from leaving the terrible bewilderment of life by means of the rope, the knife or the river.