THE ORIGIN OF CARDS.* THE game of cards, it seems,
is of respectable antiquity. The popular notion, repeated in grave treatises as well as in the ridiculous collections of disjointed information with which little children are tormented, is that they were invented by a miniature painter named Griugonneur to amuse the melancholy of the mad Bourbon Charles VI. of France. That statement was first made by Pere llienestrier, a writer who lived about the close of the reign of Louis XIV., and found Gringonneur's cards and an account of the sum paid to him for making them. It is, how- ever, erroneous, the worthy father having jumped to the conclu- sion that Gringonneur, who was simply paid for making very ornamental cards, had actually invented them, while cards have, since his time, been found of a much earlier date in use in Southern Europe. The Rev. E. S. Taylor, lately Vicar of St. Margaret's, Ormesby, Great Yarmouth, who collected most of the quaint and singular information which Mr. Hotten has just pub- lished as a history of cards, believes he can trace them to India, whence they were introduced into Europe by the gipsies. At all events cards appeared simultaneously with their arrival, and were called " tarots " or, in Italy, " tarocchi," a name derived, we imagine, from a Sauserit word. The pack of tarots differed materially from our own, but only in a way to make its origin more clear. It contained 78 cards, or rather
7 x 11 1, the mystical number seven having been multiplied by eleven, and one, the " fou " or unit, having been added, a card powerless like a cipher by itself, but increasing the power of every card with which it might be combined. The remaining seventy-seven consist of twenty-one ‘, atouts " or emblematic cards, each of which has a value of its own, and fifty-six cards analogous to those we' use, viz., four kings, four queens, four knights, four valets or knaves—the old word for a valet—and forty pip cards ranging from one to ten in four suits. This latter divi- sion, Mr. Taylor thought, was intended to represent the four castes of India, the original signs having been a vase (our heart), money (our diamond), a sword, which we retain but call a spade, because it is in Spanish " espada," and the baton or club. These are no doubt, thinks the author, emblems of the four castes, the vase denoting the priest, the money the merchant, the sword the warrior, and the club the tiller of the soil,—an ingenious though slightly over- strained suggestion. It is at least as probable that the tarots were the result of an effort to play Indian chess, the old four- sided game, with pictures which could be easily carried, and which were gradually increased by the addition of the emblems and the cipher. The tarots, though always used by the gipsies for play, were also employed for the more important function of • The History of Playing Cards. By the Rev. E. S. Taylor and others. Loaders: Rotten.
fortune-telling, an operation which the twenty-one emblematic cards made much more easy and picturesque than does the exist- ing pack. Fortune-tellers, it is said, still use them for this purpose, and usually make their guesses by rule handed down to them from a remote period.
The modern pack was formed very gradually by a process of eliminating the emblematic twenty-one, the fou or cipher, and the knights, followed much later by the elevation of the ace to supreme power in the game, a quaint but unconscious prophecy of the progress of the world, which leaves king, queen, and knave still the most conspicuous figures, but gives final and irresistible power to the lowest class. Mr. Taylor thinks the tarots were first introduced from Asia into Spain, where the people still exclude queens from the pack, and play at timbre, a formal, troublesome game, very like that played with the tarots. They were forbidden there in 1387 by John I. of Castile, and one decree of 1332 is also supposed by many to refer to them. However that may be, they appeared in Italy almost at the same time, and thence spread into France, where they underwent a great and, as it proved, a final change. They were imported into that country, Mr.
Taylor believes, in the fourteenth century, by some soldiers in the camp of Du Guesclin, whose invasion of Spain took place in 1366. Their use spread so rapidly that in 1397 they with all other games were prohibitel to artizans by the Provost of Paris, but the card used up to the end of the fourteenth century was the tarot, though the populace may from the first have thrown aside some of the emblematic figures. The first fact seems to be proved by the existence in the Imperial Library of Paris of seventeen of Gringonneur's cards, part of the excessively sumptuous pack made by him for Charles VI. soon after 1392. He had modified the Spanish game by the introduction of queens, but otherwise it retained its old form. It was in the fifteenth century, in the bad Court of Charles VII., that the French made their great change in the numbers of the pack, sweeping out the cipher, the twenty-one emblematic cards, and the four knights, but retaining Gringonneur's queens. They also struck out several of the lower numbers, and thus reduced the whole to the number required for playing piquet, the oldest of the games now played by Europe, or rather, we should say,they allowed them to be struck out, some varieties of the game admitting them, so that the full pack contained the ten numbers of each suit, a valet or jester, a queen, and a king. Finally, they adopted the pips now in use, except in Germany, where they use leaves, and which are a modi- fication of those upon the tarot cards.
Cards were introduced into England certainly before 1483, for a Parliament of Edward IV. prohibited their importation, and by 1484 had become a common Christmas game, having probably been brought over from Spain. The word jackanapes is supposed to prove this, " neypes" being the early name used in Spain, and the title applied to jester in a parti-coloured dress copied from the jester on the cards. Mr. Taylor questions this origin, but it seems at all events certain that the game was played freely in Henry VII. 'a time, and that the figures on our present cards are copies from the costume of that period. Whist, the most dis- tinctive of all English games, was not, however, invented till the reign of Charles II.
"To the period of Charles II. may most probably be referred the invention of the game of Whist. Founded upon the game known as Ruff and Honours, it was originated between 1664 and 1680; for though not mentioned in the first edition of the Compleat Gamester, published in the former year, it is named amongst the generally known games in the second edition which appeared in the latter. There was at first an additional stake called swabbers, and these stakes the holders of particular cards swept off the board. The term originated from the nautical implement used in that maritime ago by sailors to clear and 'swab' the decks. Like some other games, the kitchen was its first home, and, born in a kitchen,' it made its way to the saloon, in com- pany, very likely, with some of the gay damsels who rose so high in those days. Whist, however, became first scientifically cultivated in 1'730, when a club of gentlemen, among whom was the first Lord Folke- stone, met to play it at a coffee-house known as the Crown, in Bedford Row."
The book from which we have condensed this statement contains besides quantities of evidence on the subject, numerous illustra- tions, and heaps of somewhat scrappy anecdotes, forming a most curious compendium of fact, theory, and gossip about cards. There are chapters, too, on the different modes of cheating—not
very good; on the changes which have taken place in the designs of the playing and ornamental or fantastic cards—much better; and on chartomancy—very poor indeed. The book is worth buy- ing as a repertoire of curious and out-of-the-way information, but after Mr. Taylor's death Mr. Hotten might have had it better edited than it appears to have been.
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