How rare it is in these days to see a cricket-match played really badly— played, that is to say, in the ancient primitive style, subject of course to the laws of the game, but without further skill than is afforded by a quick eye and a ready arm, or further art than is taught by simple motherwit. It is almost distressing to see the polish that covers all our games. The English have long enjoyed the reputation of taking their pleasure sadly, but now they seem to do worse and take it seriously. What was begun as a pastime is continued as a profession; what was designed to beguile an afternoon becomes the study of a lifetime. New games, or old games revived, succeed each other in rapid sequence in the popular favour, and are as rapidly transformed from sources of enjoyment to sources of income. A few men gifted with natural aptitude study the new game, improve their skill by assiduous practice, and take possession of it as their own; the great majority, turning sorrowfully aside, look for something still newer, which men shall not be able, at any rate for a time, to play so well.

The phenomenon is not easily explained, but we suspect it to be due in great part to that exodus from the country to the town which has been so marked a feature of English life during the present reign. The greater number of our games were born on the village green, and were not designed for transplantation to the air of the city. They were devised for thick-headed rustic simplicity, not for the nimble urban intellect.

Your townsman is a great deal too acute; he seizes too quickly on

the weak points of a game, and turns them to his own advantage. It is not that he is fonder of sharp practice than his rustic neighbour, but that he is swifter to see where it may be profitably employed. He is a methodical person, moreover, and requires exact definitions for the guidance of his conduct; a bit of a lawyer, he is fond of subtle distinctions, and living as he does among a crowd, he has a natural turn, as well as a natural facility, for organisation. And thus games in his hand become a matter of written rules, which require constantly to be altered and straitened to meet alike his scientific skill and his talent for evasion. They assume an artificial and highly organised form which is foreign to natural amusement: they demand a grander environment and a more expensive apparatus; and finally they imbibe sufficient of the competitive and commercial spirit to gain an unpleasant flavour of business.

The influence of the towns on sport has been not less marked. Sport, though it may seem heresy to say so, is essentially a rustic and an aristocratic thing, not to be understood by an urban and democratic population. Look at the urban race-meetings, Sandown, Kempton, and the like, and compare them with Newmarket, or, better still, with Doncaster; could anything more plainly show the distinction between the townsman and the countryman's idea of sport? Take shooting, again: there can be no question of the extraordinary skill shown in bringing the game to the guns, and in slaying them artistically when brought; and yet the trail of artificiality lies over it all, and the spirit

of competition, as distinguished from simple rivalry, shows itself painfully in the ceremonious counting and public recording of enormous bags. We will cheerfully plead guilty to idiotcy, if required, but we prefer Colonel Hawker's exhausting days in pursuit of a brace of cock-pheasants to any number of such records. As to hunting, we fear that our views are not less heretical, for we hold that there is more real sport in the account of the trencher-fed pack in the first chapter of HANDLEY CROSS, than in all the columns of THE FIELD devoted to the shires for the last twenty years.

Cricket is, of all games, that which has emerged most triumphant from the ordeal, yet even cricket has been strangely transformed. It is governed now by rules as careful and scientific as those which govern the playing of the violin. No doubt this has enormously increased its interest to the spectators; and indeed men go to see a first-rate cricket-match in much the same spirit as they go to hear a first-rate orchestra. The great majority of such matches are played in towns before the eyes of a vast throng of townsmen and a select circle of reporters, whose business it is to prepare a kind of analytic programme of each day's play. There is abundance of keen interest and generally no lack of enthusiasm; yet, even so, the more provincial and rural the surroundings the greater is the excitement and the more genuine the appreciation. old local rivalry when the country folk gathered round the country ground, watched every movement of their champions, and wagered pots of beer on their prowess, has not by any means wholly perished; but it has too often lost its freshness and its simplicity. Rivalry has given way to competition, the love of fight to the lust of victory. Local fame and the pride of local championship have paled

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before established rank in the general world of cricket. In old days a compliment at the supper was enough. The rapturous applause which greeted such a sentiment as, "If I were not Dumkins I would be Luffey, and if I were not Podder I would be Struggles," conferred sufficient immortality on the illustrious representatives of All Muggleton and Dingley Dell. In our days they would be ambitious of quite other distinction, and would probably attain it through an abominable reproduction of their photographs. There would suddenly appear in some ephemeral series DISTINGUISHED CRICKETERS, No. 1002, Mr. Luffey, with full particulars as to his birth, breeding, and education, the furniture of his drawing-room, his wife's curling tongs, and his firstborn's perambulator. And so the hero of Dingley Dell would pass for one week from obscurity and contentment into a spurious notoriety, demoralising alike to himself and to his native place. All this is of the city, urban. The urban mind can indeed appreciate skill, but its vulgar curiosity is insatiable, and the forms it takes and the pains it will be at to gratify it are as mysterious and as many as Wiggles's intrigues.

It is curious to note the failure of cricket to take strong root in the old Saxon counties; the west of England does not naturally take to it. Gloucestershire, indeed, if that be reckoned part of the West country, has of course made a great name in the annals of cricket, but comparatively recently and principally owing to the rise of one family. Somerset, again, has within the last few years struggled to the front, and we are curious to see how long she will maintain her position. But Dorset is guiltless of cricket, and still more so are Devon and Cornwall. The explanation cannot lie in the fact that these counties are made over to an agricultural population; for such a defini

tion would exclude Kent. Nor is there evidence to show that they fell behind the rest of England in respect of other rural sports, least of all in those that had their root in selfdefence. There is not the least reason for supposing that the archers of Devon and Cornwall shot one whit worse than the rest of their countrymen, while both counties possessed their own schools of wrestling, though that, to be sure, has now ceased as a village pastime. There are not a few men surviving to whom the picture of the village-revels as painted in GEOFFREY HAMLYN is still full of life; and the two champions who divided the honours of the Exmoor district are still abroad, though past the allotted span of years, to tell of the days when they wrestled all through Saturday afternoon and went to church next day, if victorious, with the silver spoons which they had won flaunting conspicuously in their hats. But all this has passed away; and if the wrestling should ever be revived it will almost certainly be laid hold of by the townsmen for purposes of profit and gambling, and will go the way of the prize-ring.

But though there might seem to be plenty of room for cricket in Devon, we do not believe that it will ever flourish there. We have seen it planted again and again by enthusiastic parsons from other counties, encouraged by the rustics for a time with a certain spasmodic energy, and incontinently neglected so soon as the parson's hand was withdrawn. While it lasted it was primitive cricket indeed. Such a thing as a pair of flannel trousers was never seen except on the parson's legs, and the rasping sound of the corduroys when, as frequently happened, the greater part of the field ran wildly after some great hit, could be heard half a mile away. All that physical strength could do

was done. The bowling was all underhand of the most ferocious and, in the normal rough condition of the pitch, most dangerous description. If by chance some favoured mortal, such as the schoolmaster's son, had learned to bowl round-arm, his efforts, however feeble, were treated with the respect due to superior science. The batting was of two kinds, which were never combined in any one individual. The eleven was distributed into blockers and hitters. It was the function of the former to keep up their wickets and of the latter to make runs in fact the one represented the defensive and the other the offensive element, like the old pikemen and musketeers; but somehow the division of labour did not fit in well with the nature of the game, and the scores were never very large. The hitting, indeed, was of like ferocity with the bowling, for there was no lack of quick eyes and strong arms; but the blocker was generally averse to hard running, except in favour of some feeble stroke of his own, and the result was that blockers and hitters generally ran each other out. Then came recrimination and not unfrequently faction; for the blocker represented science and the hitter brute force, and these two are everywhere and at all times antagonistic.

The game never really took root in those Western hearts. They went through it willingly, for in Devon. they are a well-mannered, complaisant folk who will follow a keen leader anywhere from simple tenderness towards his feelings, but they played without real interest or enthusiasm. If, as frequently happened, a fisherman came flogging down the river which bounded one corner of the ground, many eyes in the field turned wistfully towards him. The small boys ran straight away from watching the game and discussed every cast of the

line and every fish that rose in awestruck whispers, begging permission to examine every captive minutely before he was put in the basket. There was not one of them who would not have preferred an hour's groping after trout to a whole afternoon at cricket; and the men, if called upon at a moment's notice to draw the stumps, cut themselves sticks, and fall in to beat a covert, would have responded with joyful alacrity. We We would by no means imply that the sporting instinct is incompatible with a love of cricket; but it is certain that in Devon, where the former is unusually strong, the latter is altogether wanting. Whether this be due to a relaxing climate, or to the ever-present menace of rain, we do not pretend to decide; but we are pretty confident that the majority of Devonshire boys could be lured at any moment from cricket even by so unattractive a bait as the prospect of taking a wasps' nest.

Nevertheless we think that the most primitive cricket-match that ever came under our observation was one in which we took part many years ago in a tropical island. Nothing shall persuade us to give any clue as to the identity of the said island; it must suffice that it lies within the tropic of Cancer, and that the white people therein, being of English descent, have a certain knowledge of English pastimes and prosecute them with as much energy as a high thermometer may permit. We must here confess to an uneasy feeling that cricket, except when played on English turf, is somewhat unreal. Deep down indeed in our heart lurks the doubt whether the Briton was meant to be more than a sojourner and a pilgrim in lands where his native grass refuses to grow. We are well aware that we are thereby excluding him from many colonies that enjoy a reputation for prosperity and a still

greater reputation for cricket; but the doubt is there, and we have never been able wholly to repudiate it. There is something about the eternal blue sky and the eternal blazing sun that seems ill-fitted for the children of these foggy islands; and an eternal hard wicket never appears to us quite in keeping with the uncertainty of the noble game. Even in seasons of drought, such as last year and the present, the monotony of the weather engenders a certain monotony of feature in a harvest of great scores.

After this, it will not surprise our readers to learn that we have, for our own part, and to our great misfortune, never attained to the least skill at cricket. Like all Englishmen, we played strenuously as a boy, and even now are never weary of watching the game; but we have only just sufficient knowledge to appreciate its difficulties, and the rest is awe. We never thought even to have played a match in the tropics, for we had a full sense of our own incompetence and a dread, which sad experience had proved to be not unreasonable, of the tropical sun. In a strange land it is easy to pass for one who, though not a player, is a good judge of the game, and this was the reputation which we sought by judicious reticence to establish. But one fine day, when an emissary came round to piteously entreat us to make one of an eleven to represent the old country against the island, our resolution began to waver. The match was to have been between the garrison and the island, but the garrison was too weak to take the field without the help of civilians, and even the civilians who could be depended on were few. The honour of the old country was at stake, and in a moment of weakness we consented.

The match, by a merciful dispensation, did not begin until the afternoon. It was a blazing day with a fierce sun

and a cloudless sky. The canes that bounded one side of the ground were dense and high, and the negroes, who were crowding back for the harvest, were present in hundreds. The audience was distinguished as well as large. The wives of nearly all the high dignitaries of the island were. there, and most of the dignitaries: the General with his aide-de-camp; the Bishop in holiday, and somewhat unepiscopal, garb; the Military Secretary with a blue envelope peeping out of his pocket, and the Colonial Secretary in his best white hat; and, for a short time, his Excellency the Governor himself. Even the Military Chaplain came out with a mob of white-faced children hanging on to both hands, and gave the monthly nurse a chance of leaving her patient for a moment to peep at all these great personages from the verandah.

It was no easy matter to make up our eleven. Three English noncommissioned officers in regulation helmets, grey flannel shirts, very dirty white trousers, girt about with red belts and clasps of extremely florid design, were ready and, judging by their language, thirsting for the fray. A blue-eyed, fair-haired subaltern, fresh from England and not yet exhausted by the cumulative burden of the heat, was also on the alert, and a young officer of the Pay Department with him. A little captain with a large moustache was importunate with every man he met to play for the honour of the British Army; and a young Irish doctor, fresh from the hospitals, and apparently not very confident of his prowess, was only kept up to the mark by two more of his own profession, one of whom was prepared to play if wanted. These, together with ourselves, made nine; whence the other two were to come from no one knew and apparently no one cared. Then came the

question of a captain. No one had thought of this; but as all the work so far had been thrown on the subaltern, and as every fresh problem that arose was referred to him for solution, it was decided that he should be captain. With his honours fresh upon him he called Heads to the spin of the coin, and amid the loud murmurs of his side was declared to have lost. Fortunately the island eleven generously sent our side to the wickets, and the danger of immediate mutiny was averted.

The subaltern and the paymaster went to the wicket, and then it was discovered that our umpire was missing. "Billy," yelled half a dozen voices at the unlucky subaltern, "who's the umpire?" "The Major," he yelled back; but the Major was not to be found, and it was necessary to provide a substitute until he should think fit to appear. Meanwhile the match began, and the two batsmen, both of whom could play a little, were just getting set, when, in an evil hour, the Major arrived and with many apologies took his place as umpire. He had been to the club, he said, on important private business and could not get away before. Those who knew the gallant officer looked at him with some curiosity as he made the announcement; but he walked to the wicket with great dignity, and there was no more to be said. In the very next over a ball struck the top of the paymaster's pad and passed into the wicket-keeper's hands. "How's that?" asked the bowler of the Major. "Out," said the Major. "Why, it hit my pad!" protested the paymaster, who had a liver and therefore a temper. "Pad be d- —d," retorted the Major, who disliked the batsman; "do you think I don't know the difference between a pad and a bat? If you had said it hit your head, I might have mistaken the