Читать книгу The Decline and Fall of Whist - John Petch Hewby - Страница 7

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Because a game has been overlaid by petty detail, and injured by having its square pegs driven into round holes, it does not on that account become a modern game, any more than the Trojan priest, when the serpents set upon him and strangled him, became a modern Laocoon. First, this figment of a modern game is devised, and then used as a convenient peg to hang other figments upon.

Whist, as far as I have been able to ascertain from a tolerably careful study of the leading authorities, “has slowly broadened down from precedent to precedent;” there has been no solution of continuity; and other investigators hold the same belief. “We suspect that Cavendish very often objected to that ancient plagiarist Mathews for stealing his ideas.” “In the bulk the two systems agree.”—Westminster Papers.

“There is no essential difference between modern and old-fashioned Whist, i.e., between Hoyle and Cavendish, Mathews and J. C.”—Mogul.

So “the modern game” would appear to be an imaginary line, on one side of which stand all the authorities from Hoyle to Clay, including Cavendish on Whist;—recently designated fossils—on the other, “the great twin brethren,” Cavendish in The Field and the ‘Theory of Whist.’