The consequence of this taste for his society carried young Burney into every scene of high dissipation which, at that period, made the round of the existence of a buckish fine gentleman; and he was continually of the party at White’s, at Brookes’s, and at every other superfine club house, whether public or private, to which the dangerous allurement of gaming, or the scarcely less so of being à la mode, tempted his fashionable patron.
As Mr. Greville uniformly, whether at cards, dice, or betting, played with Honour, his success, of course, was precarious; but as he never was so splendidly prosperous as to suffer himself to be beguiled out of all caution; nor yet so frequently unfortunate as to be rendered desperate, he was rarely distressed, though now and then he might be embarrassed.
At these clubs, the subject of these memoirs witnessed scenes that were ever after rivetted on his memory. Cards, betting, dice, opened every nocturnal
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orgie with an éclat of expectation, hope, ardour, and fire, that seemed to cause a mental inflammation of the feelings and faculties of the whole assembly in a mass.
On the first night of the entrance of young Burney into this set, Mr. Greville amused himself with keeping out of the way, that he might make over the new comer to what was called the humour of the thing; so that, by being unknown, he might be assailed, as a matter of course, for bets, holding stakes, choosing cards, &c. &c., and become initiated in the arcana of a modish gaming house; while watchful, though apart, Mr. Greville enjoyed, with high secret glee, the novelty of the youth’s confusion.
But young Burney had the native good sense to have observed already, that a hoax soon loses its power of ridicule where it excites no alarm in its object. He gaily, therefore, treated as a farce every attempt to bring him forward, and covered up his real ignorance upon such subjects by wilful blunders that apparently doubled it; till, by making himself a pretended caricature of newness and inaptness, he got, what in coteries of that sort is always successful, the laugh on his side.
As the evening advanced, the busy hum of common-place
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chattery subsided; and a general and collected calmness ensued, such ............