Come, help me--

After explaining the game and describing the handsomest cup-and-balls
recorded in history, after relating what fabulous custom it had
formerly brought to the Singe-Vert and to all dealers in toys and
turned ivories, and finally, after proving that the game attained to
the dignity of statics, Gourdon ended the first canto with the
following conclusion, which will remind the erudite reader of all the
conclusions of the first cantos of all these poems:--

'Tis thus that the arts and the sciences, too,
Find wisdom in things that seemed silly to you.

The second canto, invariably employed to depict the manner of using
"the object," explaining how to exhibit it in society and before
women, and the benefit to be derived therefrom, will be readily
conceived by the friends of this virtuous literature from the
following quotation, which depicts the player going through his
performance under the eyes of his chosen lady:--

Now look at the player who sits in your midst,
On that ivory ball how his sharp eye is fixt;
He waits and he watches with keenest attention,
Its least little movement in all its precision;
The ball its parabola thrice has gone round,
At the end of the string to which it is bound.
Up it goes! but the player his triumph has missed,
For the disc has come down on his maladroit wrist;
But little he cares for the sting of the ball,
A smile from his mistress consoles for it all.