COMIC CARDS.
AN attempt has been made, by Messrs. REYNOLDS and Sons, to give a comical character to playing cards, by putting ludicrous faces on the kings, queens, and knaves, and filling up the pips—which appear as white apertures in a coloured ground—with grotesque heads; but with no more success than has attended other efforts to introduce droll devices or to pictorialize the pack. The grand objection to the present alteration is that the pips do not catch the eye so readily as is desirable, nor look so lively as the spots of black and red; while the representa- tion of the black suits by a blue ground, and the red ones by a pink one, makes them too evident in the dealing, and destroys the harmony of the colours.
There are many far more important innovations that would be sooner snetioned than a change in the appearance of playing-cards. To put ridiculous heads on the court cards, is a sort of Nse-majesteugainst their honours, enough to make Pam start up and strike the traitor with his club. The quaint, formal, party-coloured liveries are retained—for to abolish them would seem as monstrous as to modernize Egyptian hieroglyphics, or to strip off the herald's tabard. (hods, however, might be made elegant, with some show of reason; but to make them comical, is to divert the attention from the game. There is nothing hke the old-fashioned symbols, after all
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