Edmond Hoyle

The Powder of Sympathy by Christopher Morley.

Section 13, According to Hoyle.

If it be true, remarks old John Mistletoe in his little-known Life of Edmund Hoyle, that a happy life leaves behind it little material for the biographer, and only those whose careers have been marked by the pangs of ambition and the weariness of achievement offer maxims for the moralist, then there is little to be said of Edmund Hoyle.

And yet it is odd that a man whose name has become proverbial, who lived to the age of close upon a century, 1672 to 1769, and who standardized and codified the chief social amusement of his age into an etiquette which remained unchanged for six generations, it is odd, I say, that this great peaceful benefactor has left so slight a trace in biographical annals.

For I ask you, which of Hoyle's contemporaries conferred a more placable and sedentary boon upon the world than he? Hoyle, continues Mr.

Mistletoe, was a man of very speechless humor.

It was his want to say that he had been lured into the study and metaphysic of whist because it was a silent game.

As is well known, the game was originally called whisk.