This passage gives us the costume--white drawers and red slippers. The
contemporary works of art, whereof see a little gallery on the walls
of the pavilion at Lord’s, show that men when they played also wore
a kind of jockey cap. In a sketch of the Arms of Shrewsbury School,
little boys are playing; the bat is a kind of hockey-stick as in the
preceding century. There are only two stumps, nor more in Hayman’s
well-known picture engraved 1755. The fields are well set for the
bowling, and are represented with their hands ready for a catch. There
are umpires in their usual places; the scores are kept by men who cut
notches in tally-sticks. Such ‘notches’ were ‘got’ by ‘Miss Wicket’ a
sportive young lady in a somewhat later caricature (p. 7). The ball
(1770) has heavy cross-seams. But a silver ball, about a hundred years
old, used as a snuff-box by the Vine Club at Sevenoaks, is marked with
seams like those of to-day. Miss Wicket, also, carries a curved bat,
but it has developed beyond the rustic crooked stick, and more nearly
resembles some of the old curved bats at Lord’s, with which a strong
man must have hit prodigious skyers. We may doubt if bats were ever
such ‘three-man beetles’ as the players in an undated but contemporary
picture at Lord’s do fillip withal. The fields, in this curious
piece, are all in a line at square-leg, and disappear in a distance
unconscious of perspective.
[Illustration: After a Picture by Hayman, R.A., belonging to the M.C.C.]
Cricket had even before this date reached that height of prosperity
which provokes the attention of moralists. ‘Here is a fine morning:
let us go and put down some form of enjoyment,’ says the moralist. In
1743 a writer in the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’ was moved to allege that
‘the exercise may be strained too far.... Cricket is certainly a very
good and wholesome exercise, yet it may be abused if either great or
little people make it their business.’ The chief complaint is that
great and little people play together--butchers and baronets. Cricket
‘propagates a spirit of idleness at the very time when, with the
utmost industry, our debts, taxes, and decay of trade will scarcely
allow us to get bread.’ The Lydians, according to Herodotus, invented
games to make them forget the scarcity of bread. But the gentleman in
the magazine is much more austere than Herodotus. ‘The advertisements
most impudently recite that great sums are laid’; and it was, indeed,
customary to announce a match for 500_l._ or 1,000_l._ Whether these
sums were not drawn on Fancy’s exchequer, at least in many cases, we
may reasonably doubt. In his ‘English Game of Cricket’ (p. 138) the
learned Mr. Box quotes a tale of betting in 1711, from a document which
he does not describe. It appears that in 1711 the county of Kent played
All England, and money was lost and won, and there was a law-suit to
recover. The court said, ‘Cricket is, to be sure, a manly game and not
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