THE CRICKET FIELD.

CHAPTER I.

ORIGIN OF THE GAME OF CRICKET.

THE Game of Cricket, in some rude form, is undoubtedly as old as the thirteenth century. But whether at that early date Cricket was the name it generally bore is quite another question. For Club-Ball we believe to be the name which usually stood for Cricket in the thirteenth century; though, at the same time, we have some curious evidence that the term Cricket at that early period was also known. But the identity of the game with that now in use is the chief point; the name is of secondary consideration. Games commonly change their names, as every schoolboy knows, and bear different appellations in different places.

Nevertheless, all previous writers acquiescing quietly in the opinion of Strutt, expressed in his (6 Sports and Pastimes," not only forget that

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Cricket may be older than its name, but erroneously suppose that the name of Cricket occurs in no author in the English language of an earlier date than Thomas D'Urfey, who, in his “Pills to purge Melancholy," writes thus:

"Herr was the prettiest fellow
At foot-ball and at Cricket;
At hunting chase or nimble race
How featly Herr could prick it."

The words "How featly" Strutt properly writes in place of a revolting old-fashioned oath in the original.

Strutt, therefore, in these lines quotes the word Cricket as first occurring in 1710.

About the same date Pope wrote,

"The Judge to dance his brother Sergeants call,
The Senators at Cricket urge the ball."

And Duncome, curious to observe, laying the scene of a match near Canterbury, wrote,

"An ill-timed Cricket Match there did

At Bishops-bourne befal."

Soame Jenyns, also, early in the same century, wrote in lines that showed that cricket was very much of a "sporting " amusement:

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England, when once of peace and wealth possessed,
Began to think frugality a jest;

So grew polite: hence all her well-bred heirs
Gamesters and jockeys turned, and cricket-players."
Ep. I. b. ii., init.

However, we are happy to say that even among comparatively modern authors we have beaten Strutt in his researches by twenty-five years; for Edward Phillips, John Milton's nephew, in his "Mysteries of Love and Eloquence (8vo. 1685), writes thus:

“Will you not, when you have me, throw stocks at my head and cry, 'Would my eyes had been beaten out of my head with a cricket-ball the day before I saw thee?'"

We shall presently show the word Cricket, in Richelet, as early as the year 1680.

A late author has very sensibly remarked that Cricket could not have been popular in the days of Elizabeth, or we should expect to find allusions to that game, as to tennis, football, and other sports, in the early poets; but Shakspeare and the dramatists who followed, he observes, are silent on the subject.

As to the silence of the early poets and dramatists on the game of cricket—and no one conversant with English literature would expect to find it except in some casual allusion or illustration in an old play this silence we can confirm on the best authority. What if we presumed to advance that the early dramatists, one and all, ignore