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.’