I am scandalised by the wholesale way I have to steal early history from Mr. Pycroft’s book. The only excuse is that I do not know where to go to better it, though probably I may supplement it from chance sources. [Illustration: The LAWS of the NOBLE GAME of CRICKET. as revised by the Club at S^t. Mary-le-bone. _From the Frontispiece to the Laws._] In 1795 he tells us of matches in which the captains were respectively the Hon. Colonel Lennox—who fought a duel with the Duke of York—and the Earl of Winchelsea. A munificent supporter of the game was my Lord of Winchelsea, and used to rig out his merry men in suits of knee-breeches, shirts, hosen, and silver caps. It was a kind of feudal age of cricket, when the great captains prided themselves on the powers of their retainers, and staked largely on the result. “In 1797,” says Pycroft, “the Montpelier Club and ground attract our notice,” and then goes on to speak of Swaffham in Norfolk, as a country of keen but not very successful cricketers. Lord Frederick Beauclerk took down an eleven that appears to have beaten three elevens combined of the Norfolk folk, and that in a single innings. This Lord Frederick Beauclerk, with the Hon. H. and Hon. J. Tufton, got up the first Gents _v._ Players match in 1798; but though the Gents, after the generous fashion of the day, were reinforced by the three chief flowers of the professional flock—namely, Tom Walker, Beldham, and Hammond—the Players beat them. In the same year Kent essayed to play England, only to be beaten into little pieces, and in 1800 they began the new century more modestly by playing with twenty-three men against twelve of England. For of course, after all has been said, the centre of the national game, as of everything national, was then, as now, smoky London. Lord’s Pavilion was then, as it had been since 1787, on the site that Dorset Square occupies now. In London the men collected who loved cricket, and had the money to bet on the game and to engage the services of the players. There were keener cricketers, more general interest in cricket, then than a little later in the century. Three to four thousand spectators sometimes came to see a match at Lord’s, and royalties sometimes took a hand in the game. In the first years of the new century, Surrey was the great cricketing county. Only two of the All England eleven, Lord Frederick Beauclerk and Hammond, came from any other county. Hammond was wicket-keeper to the famous Homerton Club—“the best,” says Mr. Ward, quoted by Pycroft, “we ever had. Hammond played till his sixtieth year, but Brown and Osbaldestone put all wicket-keeping to the rout”—by the pace of their bowling, of course.