small rooms, its decorations in vulgar taste, and, to crown the
whole, its associations of a corrupting revelry,--Carlton House
was, in the days of good King George, almost as great a scandal
to the country as Whitehall in the time of improper King Charles
II.[66] The influence which the example of a young prince, of
manners eminently popular, produced upon the young nobility of
the realm was most disastrous in every way and ruinous to public
morality.


[66] Wharton, `The Queens of Society.' Mem. of
_Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire._


After that period, the vast license given to those abominable
engines of fraud, the E.O. tables,[67] and the great length of
time which elapsed before they met with any check from the
police, afforded a number of dissolute and abandoned characters
an opportunity of acquiring property. This they afterwards
increased in the low gaming houses, and by following up the same
system at Newmarket and the other fashionable places of resort,
and finally by means of the lottery, that mode of insensate
gambling; till at length they acquired a sum of money nothing
short of _ONE MILLION STERLING_.

[67] So called from the letters E and O, the turning up of
which decided the bet. They were otherwise called _Roulette_ and
_Roly Poly_, from the balls used in them. They seem to have been
introduced in England about the year 1739. The first was set up
at Tunbridge and proved extremely profitable to the proprietors.