Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 5).djvu/78

 HAT'S on the cards?' A question common enough when the actual knowledge of the moment does not afford a positive answer; a question, too, which has an origin taking us back to the earliest use of playing cards. But to how many of those to whom playing cards as a means of recreation are familiar is it known what may be found on the cards? Yet upon these "bits of painted cardboard" there has been expended a greater amount of ingenuity and of artistic effort than is to be found in any other form of popular amusement. Pope’s charming epic, "The Rape of the Lock", gives us, in poetic form, a description of the faces of the cards as known to him and to the card-players of his time:—

It is not our purpose to historically trace the evolution of cards—this is a subject beyond the reach of the present article—but a look further afield will give us evidence that during the last three centuries there has been a constant adaptation of cards to purposes which take them beyond their intention as the instruments for card playing only. The idea that playing cards had their origin the later years of Charles VI. of Trance may be disposed of at once as a popular error, though it is true that the earliest