And, in these lines, Virgil truly describes the right sort of man for a cricketer: plenty of life in him: not barely soul enough, as Robert South said, to keep his body from putrefaction; but, however large his stature, though he weigh twenty stone, like (we will not say Mr. Mynn), but an olden wicket-keeper, named Burt, or a certain infant genius in the same line, of good Cambridge town,—he must, like these worthies aforesaid, have νους in perfection, and be instinct with sense all over. Then, says Virgil, igneus est ollis vigor: “they must always have the steam up,” otherwise the bard would have agreed with us, they are no good in an Eleven, because—

that is, you must suspend the laws of gravitation before they can stir,—dull clods of the valley, and so many stone of carrion; and then Virgil proceeds to describe what discipline will render those, who suffer the penalties of idleness or intemperance, fit to join the chosen few in the cricket-field:

Of course Elysium means “Lords,” and læta arva, “the shooting fields.” We make no apology for classical quotations. At the Universities, cricket and scholarship very generally go together. When, in 1836, we played victoriously on the side of Oxford against Cambridge, seven out of our eleven were classmen; and, it is doubtless only to avoid an invidious distinction that “Heads v. Heels,” as was once suggested, has failed to be an annual University match; though the seri studiorum—those put to school late—would not have a chance. We extract the following:—

From all this we argue that, on the authority of ancient and the experience of modern times, cricket wants mind as well as matter, and, in every sense of the word, a good understanding. How is it that Clarke’s slow bowling is so successful? ask Bayley or Caldecourt; or say Bayley’s own bowling, or that of Lillywhite, or others not much indebted to pace. “You see, sir, they bowl with their heads.” Then only is the game worthy the notice of full-grown men. “A rubber of whist,” says the author of the “Diary of a late Physician,” in his “Law Studies,” “calls into requisition all those powers of mind that a barrister most needs;” and nearly as much may be said of a scientific game of cricket. Mark that first-rate bowler: the batsman is hankering for his favourite cut—no—leg stump is attacked again—extra man on leg side—right—that’s the spot—leg stump, and not too near him. He is screwed up, and cannot cut away; Point has it—persevere—try again—his patience soon will fail. Ah! look at that ball;—the bat was more out of the perpendicular—now the bowler alters his pace—good. A dropping ball—over-reached and all but a mistake;—now a slower pace still, with extra twist—hits furiously to leg, too soon. Leg-stump is grazed, and bail off. “You see, sir,” says the veteran, turning round, “an old player, who knows what is, and what is not, on the ball, alone can resist all the temptations that leg-balls involve. Young players are going their round of experiments, and are too fond of admiration and brilliant hits; whereas it is your upright straight players that worry a bowler—twenty-two inches of wood, by four and a quarter—every inch of them before the stumps, hitting or blocking, is rather disheartening; but the moment a man makes ready for a leg hit, only about five inches by four of wood can cover the wicket; so leg-hitting is the bowler’s chance: cutting also for a similar reason. If there were no such thing as leg-hitting, we should see a full bat every time, the man steady on his legs, and only one thing to think of; and what a task a bowler would have. That was Mr. Ward’s play—good for something to the last. First-rate straight play and free leg-hitting seldom last long together: when once exulting in the luxurious excitement of a leg volley, the muscles are always on the quiver to swipe round, and the bowler sees the bat raised more and more across wicket. So, also, it is with men who are yearning for a cut: forming for the cut, like forming for leg-hit—aye, and almost the idea of those hits coming across the mind—set the muscles off straight play, and give the bowler a chance. There is a deal of head-work in bowling: once make your batsman set his mind on one hit, and give him a ball requiring the contrary, and he is off his guard in a moment.”

Certainly, there is something highly intellectual in our noble and national pastime. But the cricketer must possess other qualifications; not only physical and intellectual, but moral qualifications also. Of what avail is the head to plan and hand to execute, if a sulky temper paralyses exertion, and throws a damp upon the field; or if impatience dethrones judgment, and the man hits across at good balls, because loose balls are long in coming; or, again, if a contentious and imperious disposition leaves the cricketer all ‘alone in his glory,’ voted the pest of every eleven?

The pest of the hunting-field is the man always thinking of his own horse and own riding, galloping against MEN and not after HOUNDS. The pest of the cricket-field is the man who bores you about his average—his wickets—his catches; and looks blue even at the success of his own party. If unsuccessful in batting or fielding, he gives up all—“the wretch concentred all in self.” No! Give me the man who forgets himself in the game, and, missing a ball, does not stop to exculpate himself by dumb show, but rattles away after it—who does not blame his partner when he is run out—who plays like play and not like a painful operation. Such a chilly, bleak, northwest aspect some men do put on—it is absurd to say they are enjoying themselves. We all know it is trying to be out first ball. “Oh! that first look back at rattling stumps—why, I couldn’t have had right guard!”—that conviction that the ball turned, or but for some unaccountable suspension of the laws of motion (the earth perhaps coming to a hitch upon its ungreased axis) it had not happened! Then there’s the spoiling of your average, (though some begin again and reckon anew!) and a sad consciousness that every critic in the three tiers of the Pavilion, as he coolly speculates “quis cuique dolor victo, quæ gloria palmæ,” knows your mortification. Oh! that sad walk back, a “returned convict;” we must all pace it, “calcanda semel via leti.” A man is sure never to take his eyes off the ground, and if there’s a bit of stick in the way he kicks it instinctively with the side of his shoe. Add, that cruel post mortem examination into your “case,” and having to answer the old question, How was it? or perhaps forced to argue with some vexatious fellow who imputes it to the very fault on which you are so sore and sensitive. All this is trying; but since it is always happening, an “inseparable accident” of the game, it is time that an unruffled temper should be held the “differentia” of the true cricketer and bad temper voted bad play. Eleven good-tempered men, other points equal, would beat eleven sulky or eleven irritable gentlemen out of the field. The hurling of bats and angry ebullitions show inexperience in the game and its chances; as if any man in England could always catch, or stop, or score. This very uncertainty gives the game its interest. If Pilch or Parr were sure of runs, who would care to play? But as they make sometimes five and sometimes fifty, we still contend with flesh and blood. Even Achilles was vulnerable at the heel; or, mythologically, he could not stop a shooter to the leg stump. So never let the Satan icagency of the gaming-table brood on those “happy fields” where, strenua nos exercet inertia, there is an energy in our idle hours, not killing time but enjoying it. Look at good honest James Dean; his “patient merit” never “goes Out sighing” nor In, either—never in a mumbling, though a “melting mood.” Perspiration may roll off him, like bubbles from a duck’s back, but it’s all down to the day’s work. He looks, as every cricketer should look, like a man out for a holiday, shut up in “measureless content.” It is delightful to see such a man make a score.

Add to all this, perseverance and self-denial, and a soul above vain-glory and the applause of the vulgar. Aye, perseverance in well-doing—perseverance in a straightforward, upright, and consistent course of action.—See that player practising apart from the rest. What an unpretending style of play—a hundred pounds appear to depend on every ball—not a hit for these five minutes—see, he has a shilling on his stumps, and Hillyer is doing his best to knock it off. A question asked after every ball, the bowler being constantly invited to remind him of the least inaccuracy in hitting or danger in defence. The other players are hitting all over the field, making every one (but a good judge) marvel. Our friend’s reward is that in the first good match, when some supposed brilliant Mr. Dashwood has been stumped from leg ball—(he cannot make his fine hits in his ground)—bowled by a shooter or caught by that sharpest of all Points Ἄναξ ἄνδρων, then our persevering friend—ball after ball dropping harmless from his bat, till ever and anon a single or a double are safely played away—has two figures appended to his name; and he is greeted in the Pavilion as having turned the chances of the game in favour of his side.

Conceit in a cricketer, as in other things, is a bar to all improvement—the vain-glorious is always thinking of the lookers-on, instead of the game, and generally is condemned to live on the reputation of one skying leg-hit, or some twenty runs off three or four overs (his merriest life is a short one) for half a season.

In one word, there is no game in which amiability and an unruffled temper is so essential to success, or in which virtue is rewarded, half as much as in the game of cricket. Dishonest or shuffling ways cannot prosper; the umpires will foil every such attempt—those truly constitutional judges, bound by a code of written laws—and the public opinion of a cricket club, militates against his preferment. For cricket is a social game. Could a cricketer play a solo, or with a dummy (other than the catapult), he might play in humour or out of humour; but an Eleven is of the nature of those commonwealths of which Cicero said that, without some regard to the cardinal virtues, they could not possibly hold together.

Such a national game as cricket will both humanise and harmonise the people. It teaches a love of order, discipline, and fair play for the pure honour and glory of victory. The cricketer is a member of a wide fraternity: if he is the best man in his club, and that club is the best club in the county, he has the satisfaction of knowing his high position, and may aspire to represent some large and powerful constituency at Lord’s. How spirit-stirring are the gatherings of rival counties! And I envy not the heart that glows not with delight at eliciting the sympathies of exulting thousands, when all the country is thronging to its battle-field studded with flags and tents. Its very look makes the heart beat for the fortune of the play; and for miles around the old coachman waves his whip above his head with an air of infinite importance if he can only be the herald of the joyous tidings, “We’ve won the day.”

Games of some kind men must have, and it is no small praise of cricket that it occupies the place of less innocent sports. Drinking, gambling, and cudgel-playing, insensibly disappear as you encourage a manly recreation which draws the labourer from the dark haunts of vice and misery to the open common, where

may raise him, without lowering themselves, by taking an interest, if not a part, in his sports. “Nature abhors a vacuum,” especially of mirth and merriment, resenting the folly of those who would disdain her bounties by that indifference and apathy which mark a very dull boy indeed. Nature designed us to sport and play at cricket as truly as to eat and drink. Without sport you have no healthful exercise: to refresh the body you must relax the mind. Observe the pale dyspeptic student ruminating on his logic, algebra, or political economy while describing his periodical revolutions around his college garden or on Constitution Hill: then turn aside and gladden your eyes and ears with the buoyant spirits and exulting energies of Bullingdon or Lord’s. See how nature rebels against “an airing,” or a milestone-measured walk! While following up a covey, or the windings of a trout-stream, we cross field after field unconscious of fatigue, and retain so pleasing a recollection of the toil, that years after, amidst the din and hum of men, we brighten at the thought, and yearn as did the poet near two thousand years ago, in the words,—

That an intelligent and responsible being should live only for amusement, is an error indeed, and one which brings its own punishment in that sinking of the heart when the cup is drained to the dregs, and pleasures cease to please.

Still field-sports, in their proper season, are Nature’s kind provision to smooth the frown from the brow, to allay “life’s fitful fever,” to—

And words are these, not a whit too strong for those who live laborious days, in this high-pressure generation. And, who does not feel his daily burthen lightened, while enjoying, pratorum viva voluptas, the joyous spirits and good fellowship of the cricket-field, those sunny hours when “the valleys laugh and sing,” and, between the greensward beneath and the blue sky above, you hear a hum of happy myriads enjoying their brief span too!

Who can describe that tumult of the breast, described by Æschylus,

those yearning energies which find in this sport their genial exercise!

How generous and social is our enjoyment! Every happy moment,—the bail springing from the bat, the sharp catch sounding in the palm, long reach or sudden spring and quick return, the exulting throw, or bails and wicket flying,—these all are joys enhanced by sympathy, purely reflected from each other’s eyes. In the cricket-field, as by the cover’s side, the sport is in the free and open air and light of heaven. No incongruity of tastes nor rude collision interferes. None minds that another, how “unmannerly” soever, should “pass betwixt the wind and his nobility.” One common interest makes common feeling, fusing heart with heart, thawing the frostwork of etiquette, and strengthening those silken ties which bind man to man.

Society has its ranks and classes. These distinctions we believe to be not artificial, but natural, even as the very courses and strata of the earth itself. Lines there are, nicely graduated, ordained to separate, what Burns calls, the tropics of nobility and affluence, from the temperate zones of a comfortable independence, and the Arctic circles of poverty: but these lines are nowhere less marked, because nowhere less wanted, than in the cricket-field. There we can waive for awhile the precedence of birth,—

And many an humble spirit, from this temporary preferment, learning the pleasure of superiority and well-earned applause, carries the same honest emulation into his daily duties. The cricket-field suggests a new version of the words

“A fair stage and no favour.” Kerseymere disdains not corduroys, nor fine clothes fustian. The cottager stumps out his landlord; scholars dare to beat their masters; and sons catch out those fathers who so often catch out them. William Beldham was many hours in the day “as good a man” as even Lord Frederick Beauclerk; and the gallant Duke of Richmond would descend from his high estate to contest the palm of manly prowess with his humblest tenantry, so far acknowledging with Robert Burns,—

Cricket forms no debasing habits: unlike the bull-fights of Spain, and the earlier sports of England, it is suited to the softer feelings of a refined age. No living creature suffers for our sport: no frogs or minnows impaled, or worms writhing upon fish-hooks,—no hare screaming before the hounds,—no wounded partridge cowering in its agony, haunts the imagination to qualify our pleasure.

Cricket lies within the reach of average powers. A good head will compensate for hand and heels. It is no monopoly for a gifted few, nor are we soon superannuated. It affords scope for a great diversity of talent. Bowling, fielding, wicket-keeping, free hitting, safe and judicious play, and good generalship—in one of these points many a man has earned a name, though inferior in the rest. There are good batsmen and the best of fields among near-sighted men, and hard hitters among weak and crippled men; in weight, nine stone has proved not too little for a first-rate, nor eighteen stone too much; and, as to age, Mr. Ward at sixty, Mr. E. H. Budd at sixty-five, and old John Small at seventy years of age, were useful men in good elevens.

Cricket is a game available to poor as well as rich; it has no privileged class. Unlike shooting, hunting, or yachting, there is no leave to ask, licence to buy, nor costly establishment to support: the game is free and common as the light and air in which it is played,—the poor man’s portion: with the poorer classes it originated, played “after hours” on village greens, and thence transplanted to patrician lawns.

We extract the following:—

Cricket is not solely a game of skill—chance has sway enough to leave the vanquished an if and a but. A long innings bespeaks good play; but “out the first ball” is no disgrace. A game, to be really a game, really playful, should admit of chance as well as skill. It is the bane of chess that its character is too severe—to lose its games is to lose your character; and most painful of all, to be outwitted in a fair and undeniable contest of long-headedness, tact, manœuvring, and common sense—qualities in which no man likes to come off second best. Hence the restless nights and unforgiving state of mind that often follows a checkmate. Hence that “agony of rage and disappointment from which,” said Sydney Smith, “the Bishop of —— broke my head with a chess-board fifty years ago at college.”

But did we say that ladies, famed as some have been in the hunting field, know anything of cricket too? Not often; though I could have mentioned two,—the wife and daughter of the late William Ward, all three now no more, who could tell you—the daughter especially—the forte and the failing of every player at Lord’s. I accompanied them home one evening, to see some records of the game, to their humble abode in Connaught Terrace, where many an ornament reminded me of the former magnificence of the Member for the City, the Bank Director, and the great Russia merchant; and I thought of his mansion in the once not unfashionable Bloomsbury Square, the banqueting room of which many a Wykehamist has cause to remember; for when famed, as the Wykehamists were, for the quickest and best of fielding, they had won their annual match at Lord’s (and twenty years since they rarely lost), Mr. Ward would bear away triumphantly the winners to end the day with him. But, talking of the ladies, to say nothing of Miss Willes, who revived overhand bowling, their natural powers of criticism, if honestly consulted, would, we think, tell some home truths to a certain class of players who seem to forget that, to be a Cricketer one must still be a man; and that a manly, graceful style of play is worth something independently of its effect on the score. Take the case of the Skating Club. Will they elect a man because, in spite of arms and legs centrifugally flying, he can do some tricks of a posture-master, however wonderful? No! elegance in simple movements is the first thing: without elegance nothing counts. And so should it be with cricket. I have seen men, accounted players, quite as bad as some of the cricketers in Mr. Pips’s diary. “Pray, Lovell,” I once heard, “have I the right guard?” “Guard indeed! Yes! keep on looking as ugly and as awkward as you are now, and no man in England can bowl for fright!” Apropos, one of the first hints in archery is, “don’t make faces when you pull your bow.” Now we do seriously entreat those young ladies, into whose hands this book may fall, to profess, on our authority, that they are judges of the game as far as appearance goes; and also that they will quiz, banter, tease, lecture, never-leave-alone, and otherwise plague and worry all such brothers or husbands as they shall see enacting those anatomical contortions, which too often disgrace the game of cricket.

Cricket, we said, is a game chiefly of skill, but partly of chance. Skill avails enough for interest, and not too much for friendly feeling. No game is played in better humour—never lost till won—the game’s alive till the last ball. For the most part, there is so little to ruffle the temper, or to cause unpleasant collision, that there is no place so free from temptation—no such happy plains or lands of innocence—as our cricket-fields. We give bail for our good behaviour from the moment that we enter them. Still, a cricket-field is a sphere of wholesome discipline in obedience and good order; not to mention that manly spirit which faces danger without shrinking, and bears disappointment with good nature. Disappointment! and say where is there more poignant disappointment, while it lasts, than, after all your practice for a match, and anxious thought and resolution to avoid every chance, and score off every possible ball, to be balked and run out, caught at the slip, or stumped even off a shooter. “The course of true love (even for cricket) never did run smooth.” Old Robinson, one of the finest batsmen of his day, had six unlucky innings in succession: once caught by Hammond, from a draw; then bowled with shooters, or picked up at short slip: the poor fellow said he had lost all his play, thinking “the fault is in ourselves, and not our stars;” and was with difficulty persuaded to play one match more, in which—whose heart does not rejoice to hear?—he made one hundred and thirty runs!

“But, as to stirring excitement,” writes a friend, “what can surpass a hardly-contested match, when you have been manfully playing an uphill game, and gradually the figures on the telegraph keep telling a better and a better tale, till at last the scorers stand up and proclaim a tie, and you win the game by a single and rather a nervous wicket, or by five or ten runs! If in the field with a match of this sort, and trying hard to prevent these few runs being knocked off by the last wickets, I know of no excitement so intense for the time, or which lasts so long afterwards. The recollection of these critical moments will make the heart jump for years and years to come; and it is extraordinary to see the delight with which men call up these grand moments to memory; and to be sure how they will talk and chatter, their eyes glistening and pulses getting quicker, as if they were again finishing ‘that rattling good match.’ People talk of the excitement of a good run with the Quorn or Belvoir hunt. I have now and then tumbled in for these good things; and, as far as my own feelings go, I can safely say that a fine run is not to be compared to a good match; and the excitement of the keenest sportsman is nothing either in intensity or duration to that caused by a ‘near thing’ at cricket. The next good run takes the place of the other; whereas hard matches, like the snow-ball, gather as they go. This is my decided opinion; and that after watching and weighing the subject for some years. I have seen men tremble and turn pale at a near match,

while, through the field, the deepest and most awful silence reigns, unbroken but by some nervous fieldsman humming a tune or snapping his fingers to hide his agitation.”

“What a glorious sensation it is,” writes Miss Mitford, in ‘Our Village,’ “to be winning, winning, winning! Who would think that a little bit of leather and two pieces of wood had such a delightful and delighting power?”

CHAP. III.
THE HAMBLEDON CLUB AND THE OLD PLAYERS.

What have become of the old scores and the earliest records of the game of cricket? Bentley’s Book of Matches gives the principal games from the year 1786; but where are the earlier records of matches made by Dehaney, Paulet, and Sir Horace Mann? All burnt!

What the destruction of Rome and its records by the Gauls was to Niebuhr,—what the fire of London was to the antiquary in his walk from Pudding Lane to Pie Corner, such was the burning of the Pavilion at Lord’s, and all the old score books—it is a mercy that the old painting of the M.C.C. was saved—to the annalist of cricket. “When we were built out by Dorset Square,” says Mr. E. H. Budd, “we played for three years where the Regent’s Canal has since been cut, and still called our ground ‘Lord’s,’ and our dining-room ‘the Pavilion.’” Here many a time have I looked over the old papers of Dehaney and Sir H. Mann; but the room was burnt, and the old scores perished in the flames. The following are curious as the two oldest scores preserved,—one of the North, the other of the South:—

NAMES OF THE PERSONS WHO PLAYED AGAINST SHEFFIELD.

In 1771 at Nottingham, and 1772 at Sheffield.

KENT AGAINST ALL ENGLAND.

Played in the Artillery-Ground, London, 1746.

ENGLAND.

KENT.

Cricket was introduced into Eton early in the last century. Horace Walpole was sent to Eton in the year 1726. Playing cricket, as well as thrashing bargemen, was common at that time. For in Walpole’s Letters, vol. i. p. 4., he says,—

“I can’t say I am sorry I was never quite a school-boy; an expedition against bargemen, or a match at cricket, may be very pretty things to recollect; but, thank my stars, I can remember things that are very near as pretty.”

The fourth Earl of Carlisle learnt cricket at Eton at the same time. The Earl writes to George Selwyn, even from Manheim, that he was up, playing at cricket, before Selwyn was out of his bed.

And now, the oldest chronicler is Old Nyren, who wrote an account of the cricketers of his time. The said Old Nyren borrowed the pen of our kind friend Charles Cowden Clarke, to whom John Keats dedicated an epistle, and who rejoiced in the friendship of Charles Lamb; and none but a spirit akin to Elia could have written like “Old Nyren.” Nyren was a fine old English yeomen, whose chivalry was cricket; and Mr. Clarke has faithfully recorded his vivid descriptions and animated recollections. And, with this charming little volume in hand, and inkhorn at my button, in 1837 I made a tour among the cottages of William Beldham, and the few surviving worthies of the same generation; and, having also the advantage of a MS. by the Rev. John Mitford, taken from many a winter’s evening with Old Fennex, I am happy to attempt the best account that the lapse of time admits, of cricket in the olden time.

From a MS. my friend received from the late Mr. William Ward, it appears that the wickets were placed twenty-two yards apart as long since as the year 1700; that stumps were then only one foot high, but two feet wide. The width some persons have doubted; but it is rendered credible by the auxiliary evidence that there was, in those days, width enough between the two stumps for cutting the wide blockhole already mentioned, and also because—whereas now we hear of stumps and bails—we read formerly of “two stumps with one stump laid across.”

We are informed, also, that putting down the wickets to make a man out in running, instead of the old custom of popping the ball into the hole, was adopted on account of severe injuries to the hands, and that the wicket was changed at the same time—1779-1780—to the dimensions of twenty-two inches by six, with a third stump added.

Before this alteration the art of defence was almost unknown: balls often passed over the wicket, and often passed through. At the time of the alteration Old Nyren truly predicted that the innings would not be shortened but better played. The long pod and curved form of the bat, as seen in the old paintings, was made only for hitting, and for ground balls too. Length balls were then by no means common; neither would low stumps encourage them: and even upright play was then practised by very few. Old Nyren relates that one Harry Hall, a gingerbread baker of Farnham, gave peripatetic lectures to young players, and always insisted on keeping the left elbow well up; in other words, on straight play. “Now-a-days,” said Beldham, “all the world knows that; but when I began there was very little length bowling, very little straight play, and little defence either.” Fennex, said he, was the first who played out at balls; before his day, batting was too much about the crease. Beldham said that his own supposed tempting of Providence consisted in running in to hit. “You do frighten me there jumping out of your ground, said our Squire Paulet:” and Fennex used also to relate how, when he played forward to the pitch of the ball, his father “had never seen the like in all his days;” the said days extending a long way back towards the beginning of the century. While speaking of going in to hit, Beldham said, “My opinion has always been that too little is attempted in that direction. Judge your ball, and, when the least over-pitched, go in and hit her away.” In this opinion Mr. C. Taylor’s practice would have borne Beldham out: and a fine dashing game this makes; only, it is a game for none but practised players. When you are perfect in playing in your ground, then, and then only, try how you can play out of it, as the best means to scatter the enemy and open the field.

“As to bowling,” continued Beldham, “when I was a boy (about 1780), nearly all bowling was fast, and all along the ground. In those days the Hambledon Club could beat all England; but our three parishes around Farnham at last beat Hambledon.”

It is quite evident that Farnham was the cradle of cricketers. “Surrey,” in the old scores, means nothing more than the Farnham parishes. This corner of Surrey, in every match against All England, was reckoned as part of Hampshire; and, Beldham truly said “you find us regularly on the Hampshire side in Bentley’s Book.”

“I told you, sir,” said Beldham, “that in my early days all bowling was what we called fast, or at least a moderate pace. The first lobbing slow bowler I ever saw was Tom Walker. When, in 1792, England played Kent, I did feel so ashamed of such baby bowling; but, after all, he did more than even David Harris himself. Two years after, in 1794, at Dartford Brent, Tom Walker, with his slow bowling, headed a side against David Harris, and beat him easily.”

“Kent, in early times, was not equal to our counties. Their great man was Crawte, and he was taken away from our parish of Alresford by Mr. Amherst, the gentleman who made the Kent matches. In those days, except around our parts, Farnham and the Surrey side of Hampshire, a little play went a long way. Why, no man used to be more talked of than Yalden; and, when he came among us, we soon made up our minds what the rest of them must be. If you want to know, sir, the time the Hambledon Club was formed, I can tell you by this;—when we beat them in 1780, I heard Mr. Paulet say, ‘Here have I been thirty years raising our club, and are we to be beaten by a mere parish?’ so, there must have been a cricket club, that played every week regularly, as long ago as 1750. We used to go as eagerly to a match as if it were two armies fighting; we stood at nothing if we were allowed the time. From our parish to Hambledon is twenty-seven miles, and we used to ride both ways the same day, early and late. At last, I and John Wells were about building a cart: you have heard of tax carts, sir; well, the tax was put on then, and that stopped us. The members of the Hambledon Club had a caravan to take their eleven about; they used once to play always in velvet caps. Lord Winchelsea’s eleven used to play in silver laced hats; and always the dress was knee-breeches and stockings. We never thought of knocks; and, remember, I played against Browne of Brighton too. Certainly, you would see a bump heave under the stocking, and even the blood come through; but I never knew a man killed, now you ask the question, and I never saw any accident of much consequence, though many an all but, in my long experience. Fancy the old fashion before cricket shoes, when I saw John Wells tear a finger nail off against his shoe-buckle in picking up a ball!”

“Your book, sir, says much about old Nyren. This Nyren was fifty years old when I began to play; he was our general in the Hambledon matches; but not half a player, as we reckon now. He had a small farm and inn near Hambledon, and took care of the ground.”

“I remember when many things first came into the game which are common now. The law for Leg-before-wicket was not passed, nor much wanted, till Ring, one of our best hitters, was shabby enough to get his leg in the way, and take advantage of the bowlers; and, when Tom Taylor, another of our best hitters, did the same, the bowlers found themselves beaten, and the law was passed to make leg-before-wicket Out. The law against jerking was owing to the frightful pace Tom Walker put on, and I believe that he afterwards tried something more like the modern throwing-bowling, and so caused the words against throwing also. Willes was not the inventor of that kind of round bowling; he only revived what was forgotten or new to the young folk.”

“The umpires did not formerly pitch the wickets. David Harris used to think a great deal of pitching himself a good-wicket, and took much pains in suiting himself every match day.”

“Lord Stowell was fond of cricket. He employed me to make a ground for him at Holt Pound.”

In the last century, when the waggon and the packhorse supplied the place of the penny train, there was little opportunity for those frequent meetings of men from distant counties that now puzzle us to remember who is North and who is South, who is Surrey or who is Kent. The matches then were truly county matches, and had more of the spirit of hostile tribes and rival clans. “There was no mistaking the Kent boys,” said Beldham, “when they came staring in to the Green Man. A few of us had grown used to London, but Kent and Hampshire men had but to speak, or even show themselves, and you need not ask them which side they were on.” So the match seemed like Sir Horace Mann and Lord Winchelsea and their respective tenantry—for when will the feudal system be quite extinct? and there was no little pride and honour in the parishes that sent them up, and many a flagon of ale depending in the farms or the hop grounds they severally represented, as to whether they should, as the spirit-stirring saying was, “prove themselves the better men.” “I remember in one match,” said Beldham, “in Kent, Ring was playing against David Harris. The game was much against him. Sir Horace Mann was cutting about with his stick among the daisies, and cheering every run,—you would have thought his whole fortune (and he would often bet some hundreds) was staked upon the game; and, as a new man was going in, he went across to Ring, and said, ‘Ring, carry your bat through and make up all the runs, and I’ll give you 10l. a-year for life.’ Well, Ring was out for sixty runs, and only three to tie, and four to beat, and the last man made them. It was Sir Horace who took Aylward away with him out of Hampshire, but the best bat made but a poor bailiff, we heard.

“Cricket was played in Sussex very early, before my day at least; but, that there was no good play I know by this, that Richard Newland, of Slinden in Sussex, as you say, sir, taught old Richard Nyren, and that no Sussex man could be found to play him. Now, a second-rate player of our parish beat Newland easily; so you may judge what the rest of Sussex then were. But before 1780 there were some good players about Hambledon and the Surrey side of Hampshire. Crawte, the best of the Kent men, was stolen away from us; so you will not be wrong, sir, in writing down that Farnham, and thirty miles round, reared all the best players up to my day, about 1780.”

“There were some who were then called ‘the old players,’”—and here Fennex’s account quite agreed with Beldham’s,—“including Frame and old Small. And as to old Small, it is worthy of observation, that Bennett declared it was part of the creed of the last century, that Small was the man who ‘found out cricket,’ or brought play to any degree of perfection. Of the same school was Sueter, the wicket-keeper, who in those days had very little stumping to do, and Minshull and Colshorn, all mentioned in Nyren.” “These men played puddling about their crease and had no freedom. I like to see a player upright and well forward, to face the ball like a man. The Duke of Dorset made a match at Dartford Brent between ‘the Old Players and the New.’—You laugh, sir,” said this tottering silver-haired old man, “but we all were New once;—well, I played with the Walkers, John Wells, and the rest of our men, and beat the Old ones very easily.”

Old John Small died, the last, if not the first of the Hambledonians, in 1826. Isaac Walton, the father of Anglers, lived to the age of ninety-three. This father of Cricketers was in his ninetieth year. John Small played in all the great matches till he was turned of seventy. A fine skater and a good musician. But, how the Duke of Dorset took great interest in John Small, and how his Grace gave him a fiddle, and how John, like a modern Orpheus, beguiled a wild bull of its fury in the middle of a paddock, is it not written in the book of the chronicles of the playmates of Old Nyren?—In a match of Hambledon against All England, Small kept up his wicket for three days, and was not out after all. A pity his score is unknown. We should like to compare it with Mr. Ward’s.

“Tom Walker was the most tedious fellow to bowl to, and the slowest runner between wickets I ever saw. Harry was the hitter,—Harry’s half-hour was as good as Tom’s afternoon. I have seen Noah Mann, who was as fast as Tom was slow, in running a four, overtake him, pat him on the back, and say, ‘Good name for you is Walker, for you never was a runner.’ It used to be said that David Harris had once bowled him 170 balls for one run! David was a potter by trade, and in a kind of skittle alley made between hurdles, he used to practise bowling four different balls from one end, and then picking them up he would bowl them back again. His bowling cost him a great deal of practice; but it proved well worth his while, for no man ever bowled like him, and he was always first chosen of all the men in England.”—Nil sine labore, remember, young cricketers all.—“‘Lambert’ (not the great player of that name), said Nyren, ‘had a most deceitful and teasing way of delivering the ball; he tumbled out the Kent and Surrey men, one after another, as if picked off by a rifle corps. His perfection is accounted for by the circumstance that when he was tending his father’s sheep, he would set up a hurdle or two, and bowl away for hours together.’

“There was some good hitting in those days, though too little defence. Tom Taylor would cut away in fine style, almost after the manner of Mr. Budd. Old Small was among the first members of the Hambledon Club. He began to play about 1750, and Lumpy Stevens at the same time. I can give you some notion, sir, of what cricket was in those days, for Lumpy, a very bad bat, as he was well aware, once said to me, ‘Beldham, what do you think cricket must have been in those days when I was thought a good batsman?’ But fielding was very good as far back as I can remember.”—Now, what Beldham called good fielding must have been good enough. He was himself one of the safest hands at a catch. Mr. Budd, when past forty, was still one of the quickest men I ever played with, taking always middle wicket, and often, by swift running, doing part of long field’s work. Sparks, Fennex, Bennett, and young Small, and Mr. Parry, were first rate, not to mention Beagley, whose style of long stopping in the North and South Match of 1836, made Lord Frederick and Mr. Ward justly proud of so good a representative of the game in their younger days. Albeit, an old player of seventy, describing the merits of all these men, said, “put Mr. King at point, Mr. C. Ridding long-stop, and Mr. W. Pickering cover, and I never saw the man that could beat either of them.”

“John Wells was a most dangerous man in a single wicket match, being so dead a shot at a wicket. In one celebrated match, Lord Frederick warned the Honourable H. Tufton to beware of John; but John Wells found an opportunity of maintaining his character by shying down, from the side, little more than the single stump. Tom Sheridan joined some of our matches, but he was no good but to make people laugh. In our days there were no padded gloves. I have seen Tom Walker rub his bleeding fingers in the dust! David used to say he liked to rind him.”

“The matches against twenty-two were not uncommon in the last century. In 1788 the Hambledon Club played two-and-twenty at Cold Ash Hill. ‘Drawing’ between leg and wicket is not a new invention. Old Small, (b. 1737, d. 1826,) was famous for the draw, and, to increase his facility he changed the crooked bat of his day for a straight bat. There was some fine cutting before Saunders’ day. Harry Walker was the first, I believe, who brought cutting to perfection. The next genuine cutter—for they were very scarce (I never called mine cutting, not like that of Saunders at least)—was Robinson. Walker and Robinson would wait for the ball till all but past the wicket, and then cut with great force. Others made good Off-hits, but did not hit late enough for a good Cut. I would never cut with slow bowling. I believe that Walker, Fennex, and myself, first opened the old players’ eyes to what could be done with the bat; Walker by cutting, and Fennex and I by forward play: but all improvement was owing to David Harris’s bowling. His bowling rose almost perpendicular: it was once pronounced a jerk; it was altogether most extraordinary.—For thirteen years I averaged forty-three a match, though frequently I had only one innings; but I never could half play unless runs were really wanted.”

CHAP. IV.
CRICKET GENERALLY ESTABLISHED AS A NATIONAL GAME BY THE END OF THE LAST CENTURY.

Little is recorded of the Hambledon Club after the year 1786. It broke up when Old Nyren left it, in 1791; though, in this last year, the true old Hambledon Eleven all but beat twenty-two of Middlesex at Lord’s. Their cricket-ground on Broadhalfpenny Down, in Hampshire, was so far removed from the many noblemen and gentlemen who had seen and admired the severe bowling of David Harris, the brilliant hitting of Beldham, and the interminable defence of the Walkers, that these worthies soon found a more genial sphere for their energies on the grounds of Kent, Surrey, and Middlesex. Still, though the land was deserted, the men survived; and imparted a knowledge of their craft to gentles and simples far and near.

Most gladly would we chronicle that these good men and true were actuated by a great and a patriotic spirit, to diffuse an aid to civilisation—for such our game claims to be—among their wonder-stricken fellow-countrymen; but, in truth, we confess that “reaping golden opinions” and coins, “from all kinds of men,” as well as that indescribable tumult and those joyous emotions which attend the ball, vigorously propelled or heroically stopped, while hundreds of voices shout applause,—that such stirring motives, more powerful far with vain-glorious man than any “dissolving views” of abstract virtue, tended to the migration of the pride of Hambledon. Still, doubtful though the motive, certain is the fact, that the old Hambledon players did carry their bats and stumps out of Hampshire into the adjoining counties, and gradually, like all great commanders, taught their adversaries to conquer too. In some instances, as with Lord Winchelsea, Mr. Amherst, and others, noblemen combined the utile dulci, pleasure and business, and retained a great player as a keeper or a bailiff, as Martingell once was engaged by Earl Ducie. In other instances, the play of the summer led to employment through the winter; or else these busy bees lived on the sweets of their sunshine toil, enjoying otium cum dignitate—that is, living like gentlemen, with nothing to do.

This accounts for our finding these Hampshire men playing Kent matches; being, like a learned Lord in Punch’s picture, “naturalised everywhere,” or “citizens of the world.”

Let us trace these Hambledonians in all their contests, from the date mentioned (1786 to 1800), the eventful period of the French Revolution and Nelson’s victories; and let us see how the Bank stopping payment, the mutiny of the fleet, and the threatened invasion, put together, did not prevent balls from flying over the tented field, in a far more innocent and rational way on this, than on the other side, of the water.

Now, what were the matches in the last century—“eleven gentlemen against the twelve Cæsars?” No! these, though ancient names, are of modern times. Kent and England was as good an annual match in the last, as in the present century. The White Conduit Fields and the Artillery Ground supplied the place of Lord’s, though in 1787 the name of Lord’s is found in Bentley’s matches, implying, of course, the old Marylebone Ground, now Dorset Square, under Thomas Lord, and not the present by St. John’s Wood, more properly deserving the name of Dark’s than Lord’s. The Kentish battlefields were Sevenoaks—the land of Clout, one of the original makers of cricket-balls,—Coxheath, Dandelion Fields, in the Isle of Thanet, and Cobham Park; also Dartford Brent and Pennenden Heath: there is also early mention of Gravesend, Rochester, and Woolwich.

Next in importance to the Kent matches were those of Hampshire and of Surrey, with each of which counties indifferently the Hambledon men used to play. For it must not be supposed that the whole county of Surrey put forth a crop of stumps and wickets all at once: we have already said that malt and hops and cricket have ever gone together. Two parishes in Surrey, adjoining Hants, won the original laurels for their county; parishes in the immediate vicinity of the Farnham hop country. The Holt, near Farnham, and Moulsey Hurst, were the Surrey grounds. The match might truly have been called “Farnham’s hop-gatherers v. those of Kent.” The former, aided occasionally by men who drank the ale of Alton, just as Burton-on-Trent, life-sustainer to our Indian empire, sends forth its giants, refreshed with bitter ale, to defend the honour of the neighbouring towns and counties. The men of Hampshire, after Broadhalfpenny was abandoned to docks and thistles, pitched their tents generally either upon Windmill Downs or upon Stoke Downs; and once they played a match against T. Assheton Smith, whose mantle has descended on a worthy representative, whether on the level turf or by the cover side. Albeit, when that gentleman has a “meet” (as occasionally advertised) at Hambledon, he must unconsciously avoid the spot where “titch and turn”—the Hampshire cry—did once exhilarate the famous James Aylward, among others, as he astonished the Farnham waggoner, by continuing one and the same innings as the man drove up on the Tuesday afternoon and down on the Wednesday morning! This match was played at Andover, and the surnames of most of the Eleven may be read on the tombstones (with the best of characters) in Andover Churchyard. Bourne Paddock, Earl Darnley’s estate, and Burley Park, in Rutlandshire, constituted often the debateable ground in their respective counties. Earl Darnley, as well as Sir Horace Mann and Earl Winchelsea, Mr. Paulet and Mr. East, lent their names and patronage to Elevens; sometimes in the places mentioned, sometimes at Lord’s, and sometimes at Perriam Downs, near Luggershal, in Wiltshire.

Middlesex also, exclusively of the Marylebone Club, had its Eleven in these days; or, we should say, its twenty-two, for that was the number then required to stand the disciplined forces of Hampshire, Kent, or England. And this reminds us of an “Uxbridge ground,” where Middlesex played and lost; also, of “Hornchurch, Essex,” where Essex, in 1791, was sufficiently advanced to win against Marylebone, an occasion memorable, because Lord Frederick Beauclerk there played nearly his first recorded match, making scarce any runs, but bowling four wickets. Lord Frederick’s first match was at Lord’s, 2nd June, 1791. “There was also,” writes the Hon. R. Grimston, “‘the Bowling-green’ at Harrow-on-the-Hill, where the school played: Richardson, who subsequently became Mr. Justice Richardson, was the captain of the School Eleven in 1782.”

Already, in 1790, the game was spreading northwards, or, rather, proofs exist that it had long before struck far and wide its roots and branches in northern latitudes; and also that it was a game as popular with the men of labour as the men of leisure, and therefore incontestably of home growth: no mere exotic, or importation of the favoured few, can cricket be, if, like its namesake, it is found “a household word” with those whom Burns aptly calls “the many-aproned sons of mechanical life.”

In 1791 Eton, that is, the old Etonians, played Marylebone, four players given on either side; and all true Etonians will thank us for informing them, not only that the seven Etonians were more than a match for their adversaries, but also that this match proves that Eton had, at that early date, the honour of sending forth the most distinguished amateurs of the day; for Lord Winchelsea, Hon. H. Fitzroy, Earl Darnley, Hon. E. Bligh, C. Anguish, Assheton Smith—good men and true—were Etonians all. This match was played in Burley Park, Rutlandshire. On the following day, June 25th, 1791, the Marylebone played eleven yeomen and artisans of Leicester; and though the Leicestrians cut a sorry figure, still the fact that the Midland Counties practised cricket sixty years ago is worth recording. Peter Heward, of Leicester, a famous wicket-keeper, of twenty years since, told me of a trial match in which he saw his father, quite an old man, with another veteran of his own standing, quickly put out with the old-fashioned slow bowling a really good Eleven for some twenty runs—good, that is, against the modern style of bowling; and cricket was not a new game in this old man’s early days (say 1780) about Leicester and Nottingham, as the score in page 41 alone would prove; for such a game as cricket, evidently of gradual development, must have been played in some primitive form many a long year before the date of 1775, in which it had excited sufficient interest, and was itself sufficiently matured in form, to show the two Elevens of Sheffield and of Nottingham. Add to this, what we have already mentioned, a rude form of cricket as far north as Angus and Lothian in 1700, and we can hardly doubt that cricket was known as early in the Midland as in the Southern Counties. The men of Nottingham—land of Clarke, Barker, and Redgate—next month, in the same year (1791) threw down the gauntlet, and shared the same fate; and next day the Marylebone, “adding,” in a cricketing sense, “insult unto injury,” played twenty-two of them, and won by thirteen runs.

In 1790, the shopocracy of Brighton had also an Eleven; and Sussex and Surrey, in 1792, sent an eleven against England to Lord’s, who scored in one innings 453 runs, the largest score on record, save that of Epsom in 1815—476 in one innings! “M.C.C. v. twenty-two of Nottingham,” we now find an annual match; and also “M.C.C. v. Brighton,” which becomes at once worthy of the fame that Sussex long has borne. In 1793, the old Westminster men all but beat the old Etonians: and Essex and Herts, too near not to emulate the fame of Kent and Surrey, were content, like second-rate performers, to have, though playing twenty-two, one Benefit between them, in the shape of defeat in one innings from England. And here we are reminded by two old players, a Kent and an Essex man, that, being schoolboys in 1785, they can respectively testify that, both in Kent and in Essex, cricket appeared to them more of a village game than they have ever seen it of late years. “There was a cricket-bat behind the door, or else up in the bacon rack, in every cottage. We heard little of clubs, except around London; still the game was played by many or by few, in every school and village green in Essex and in Kent, and the field placed much as when with the Sidmouth I played the Teignbridge Club in 1826. Mr. Whitehead was the great hitter of Kent; and Frame and Small were names as often mentioned as Pilch and Parr by our boys now.” And now (1793) the game had penetrated further West; for eleven yeomen at Oldfield Bray, in Berkshire, had learned long enough to be able to defeat a good eleven of the Marylebone Club.

In 1795, the Hon. Colonel Lennox, memorable for a duel with the Duke of York, fought—where the gallant Colonel had fought so many a less hostile battle—on the cricket ground at Dartford Brent, headed Elevens against the Earl of Winchelsea; and now, first the Marylebone eleven beat sixteen Oxonians on Bullingdon Green.

In 1797, the Montpelier Club and ground attract our notice. The name of this club is one of the most ancient, and their ground a short distance only from the ground of Hall of Camberwell.

Swaffham, in Norfolk, is now mentioned for the first time. But Norfolk lies out of the usual road, and is a county which, as Mr. Dickens said of Golden Square, before it was the residence of Cardinal Wiseman, “is nobody’s way to or from any place.” So, in those slow coach and packhorse days, the patrons of Kent, Surrey, Hants, and Marylebone, who alone gave to what else were “airy nothing, a local habitation and a name,” could not so easily extend their circuit to the land of turkeys, lithotomy, and dumplings. But it happened once that Lord Frederick Beauclerk was heard to say, his eleven should beat any three elevens in the county of Norfolk; whence arose a challenge from the Norfolk men, whom, sure enough, his Lordship did beat, and that in one innings; and a print, though not on pocket-handkerchiefs, was struck off to perpetuate this honourable achievement.

Lord F. Beauclerk was now one of the best players of his day; as also were the Hon. H. and I. Tufton. They frequently headed a division of the Marylebone, or some county club, against Middlesex, and sometimes Hampstead and Highgate.

In this year (1798) these gentlemen aforesaid made the first attempt at a match between the Gentlemen and the Players; and on this first occasion the players won; though when we mention that the Gentlemen had three players given, and also that T. Walker, Beldham, and Hammond were the three, certainly it was like playing England, “the part of England being left out by particular desire.”

Kent attacked England in 1798, but, being beaten in about half an innings, we find the Kentish men in 1800, though still hankering after the same cosmopolitan distinction, modestly accept the odds of nineteen, and afterwards twenty-three, men to twelve.

The chief patronage, and consequently the chief practice, in cricket, was beyond all comparison in London. There, the play was nearly all professional: even the gentlemen made a profession of it; and therefore, though cricket was far more extensively spread throughout the villages of Kent than of Middlesex, the clubs of the metropolis figure in the score books as defying all competition. Professional players, we may observe, have always a decided advantage in respect of judicious choice and mustering their best men. The best eleven on the side of the Players is almost always known, and can be mustered on a given day. Favour, friendship, and etiquette interfere but little with their election; but the eleven gentlemen of England are less easy to muster,—