Tell me about the game of Ombre in The Rape of the Lock.

In Canto III of the Rape of the Lock, Belinda challenges the Baron to Ombre, a popular card game among wealthy people at that time. Ombre, meaning man (hombre in Spanish) is an ancestor to our modern game of Bridge and was usually played with three people. The second link below leads to a powerpoint with a detailed explanation of how the game is played and some commentary of The Rape of the Lock.

In...

In Canto III of the Rape of the Lock, Belinda challenges the Baron to Ombre, a popular card game among wealthy people at that time. Ombre, meaning man (hombre in Spanish) is an ancestor to our modern game of Bridge and was usually played with three people. The second link below leads to a powerpoint with a detailed explanation of how the game is played and some commentary of The Rape of the Lock.

In the poem, the card game becomes another example of the mock-heroic. Pope uses his poem to make fun of the way privileged people of his era had given up pursuing goals that took genuine courage, resolution and energy. Instead, they wasted their time on trivial pursuits. The idea that a card game takes up 82 lines of this Canto, from 18-100, indicates how much time people in this world spent on recreation.  

Pope likens Belinda and the Baron's face off in a card game to two armies meeting in a field of battle. But in this case, the armies are merely decks of cards, though Pope personifies them into behaving like real kings, queens and generals. That Belinda and Baron invest so much competitive spirit into a mere card game critiques the way the upper classes use their gifts.