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 one who staked away the very clothes on his back. The same stake is referred to again in Heywood's Wise Woman of Hogsden (i. 1). "Cloak, band, rapier, all lost at dice!" exclaims one of the characters in Middleton's Spanish Gipsy (ii. 2).

Not only was dicing common, but cheating at dice so frequent as to give rise to the proverbial expressions "false as dice," and "false as dicers' oaths." An anonymous manuscript of the time of James I. tells the following typical story: "Sir William Herbert, playing at dice with another gentleman, there rose some question about a cast. Sir William's antagonist declared it was a four and a five; he as positively insisted that it was a five and a six; the other then swore with a bitter imprecation that it was as he had said; Sir William then replied, 'Thou are a perjured knave; for give me a sixpence, and if there be a four upon the dice, I will return you a thousand pounds;" at which the other was presently abashed, for indeed the dice were false, and of a high cut, without a four." Indeed there were many kinds of false dice. Some were unevenly cut, others were hollow, and some were loaded by setting in pieces of lead upon one side. The Percy Society has published A Manifest Detection of