have referred as attaching to some of them, the cards are very interesting as studies of costume and of the manners of the time—of what served to amuse our ancestors two centuries ago—and is a curious compound survival of Puritan teaching and the license of the Restoration period. We give one of them in Fig. 29.
Fig. 29.
The Ace of Clubs, shown in Fig. 30, is from a pack issued in Amsterdam about 1710, and is a good example of the Dutch burlesque cards of the eighteenth century. The majority of them have local allusions, the meaning of which is now lost; and many of them are of a character which will not bear reproduction. A better known pack of Dutch cards is that satirizing the Mississippi scheme of 1716, and the victims of the notorious John Law—the "bubble" which, on its collapse, four years later, brought ruin to so many thousands.
Fig. 30.
Fig. 31.
Our space forbids the treatment of playing cards under any but their pictorial aspects, though the temptation is great to attempt some description of their use from an early period as instruments of divination or fortune telling, for which in the hands of the "wise man" or woman of various countries they are still used, and to which primary purpose the early "Tarots" were doubtless applied; but, as it is among the more curious of such cards, we give the Queen of Hearts from a pack of the immediate post-Commonwealth period (Fig. 31). The figure is called Semiramis—without, so far as can be seen, any reason. It is one of a mélange of names for cards in
