Our national ardour for this game seems always incomprehensible to a Frenchman. There is a little trashy, conceited book now before us, in which a French writer, professing to enlighten his countrymen upon English life, dismisses this mysterious amusement in a definition, the point and elegance of which it would be a pity to spoil by translation—“_un exercice consistant à se fatiguer et à donner d’autant plus de plaisir qu’il avait fait répandre d’autant plus de sueur_.”[2] He is careful, at the same time, to suggest that even cricket is probably borrowed from his own nation—the “_jeu de paume_” of the days of the Grand Monarque. But the inability of so shrewd and intelligent an observer, as the foreign spectator with whom we have to do at present, to comprehend the real points of the game, is an additional testimony to its entirely English character. The Etonian’s mamma, who, as he relates with a sort of quiet wonder, sat for five hours on two days successively on a bench under a hot sun, to watch the match between her son’s eleven and Harrow, would have given a much better account of the game. The admiring visitor does not pretend, as he observes, to go into the details of a game which has thirty-eight rules; but he endeavours to give his French readers some general idea of the thing, which may suffice for unprofessional lookers-on. It is unnecessary to say that the idea is very general indeed. The “consecrated” ground on which the “_barrières_” are erected, and where the “_courses_” take place, are a thoroughly French version of the affair. The “ten fieldsmen precipitating themselves in pursuit of the ball when struck” would be ludicrous enough to a cricketer’s imagination, if the thought of the probable consequences were not too horrible. Even such headlong zeal on the part of two fieldsmen only, with their eye on the same ball, has resulted, before now, in a collision entailing the loss of half-a-dozen front teeth and other disfigurements. It was unnecessary to exaggerate the perils of a game which, as our author observes, has its dangers; and if the fieldsmen at Lynmere conducted themselves after this headlong fashion when he was watching them, we can quite understand his surprise that, when the day concludes with the inevitable English dinner, men who had spent the whole day “in running, striking, and receiving blows from the ball to the bruising of their limbs” (and precipitating themselves against each other) should still show themselves disposed to drink toasts and make speeches for the rest of the evening. The conversation which he has with the parish schoolmaster, an enthusiastic cricketer, is good in its way:— “‘I hope you have enjoyed the day?’ said he to me. ‘You have had an opportunity of seeing what cricket is. It’s a noble game, is it not?’ “‘Yes,’ said I, ‘it is a fine exercise; and I think highly of those amusements which bring all classes together under the influence of a common feeling.’