Part 3

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

“The squire or parson o’ the parish, Or the attorney,”

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,--

“_O rus, quando te aspiciam, quandoque licebit,_ _Ducere sollicitæ jucunda oblivia vitæ._”

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.

“_Nec lusisse pudet sed non incidere ludum._”

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--

“Raze out the written troubles of the brain, And by some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuffed bosom from that perilous stuff, Which weighs upon the heart.”

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,

----νεαρὸς μυελὸς στέρνων ἐντὸς ἀνάσσων--

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,--

“Contented with the rank that merit gives.”

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

“_Æqua tellus_ _Pauperi recluditur_ _Regumque pueris._”

“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,--

“The rank is but the guinea stamp. The man’s the gowd for a’ that.”

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:--

“The judge of the Brentford County Court has decided that cricket is a legal game, so as to render the stakeholder liable in an action for the recovery of the stakes, in a case where one of the parties had refused to play.”

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,

‘_Quum spes arrectæ juvenum exultantiaque haurit_ _Corda pavor pulsans_’--

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.

Nottingham, Aug. 26, 1771.

Huthwayte Turner Loughman Coleman Roe Spurr Stocks Collishaw Troop Mew Rawson.

Sheffield. | Nottingham. 1st inn. 81 | 1st inn. 76 2nd 62 | 2nd 112 3rd 105 | ---- | ---- 248 | 188

Tuesday, 9 o’clock, a.m. commenced, 8th man 0, 9th 5, 1 to come in, and only 60 ahead, when the Sheffield left the field.

Sheffield, June 1, 1772.

Coleman Turner Loughman Roe Spurs Stocks Collishaw Troop Mew Bamford Gladwin.

Nottingham. | Sheffield. 1st inn. 14 | Near 70

Nottingham gave in.

KENT AGAINST ALL ENGLAND.

_Played in the Artillery-Ground, London, 1746._

ENGLAND.

_1st Innings._ _2nd Innings._

RUNS. RUNS. Harris 0 b by Hadswell 4 b by Mills. Dingate 3 b Ditto 11 b Hadswell. Newland 0 b Mills 3 b Ditto. Cuddy 0 b Hadswell 2 b Danes. Green 0 b Mills 5 b Mills. Waymark 7 b Ditto 9 b Hadswell. Bryan 12 s Kips 7 c Kips. Newland 18 -- not out 15 c Ld. J. Sackville. Harris 0 b Hadswell 1 b Hadswell. Smith 0 c Bartrum 8 b Mills. Newland 0 b Mills 5 -- not out. Byes 0 Byes 0 -- -- 40 70

KENT.

_1st Innings._ _2nd Innings._

RUNS. RUNS. Lord Sackville 5 c by Waymark 3 b by Harris. Long Robin 7 b Newland 9 b Newland. Mills 0 b Harris 6 c Ditto. Hadswell 0 b Ditto 5 -- not out. Cutbush 3 c Green 7 -- not out. Bartrum 2 b Newland 0 b Newland. Danes 6 b Ditto 0 c Smith. Sawyer 0 c Waymark 5 b Newland. Kips 12 b Harris 10 b Harris. Mills 7 -- not out 2 b Newland. Romney 11 b Harris 8 c Harris. Byes 0 Byes 3 -- -- 53 58

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.”