Mr. Clarke agreed with him in his dislike of round-hand bowling, save when Lillywhite was pitted against Fuller Pilch--a beautiful thing to see, as the Bishop of St. Andrews testifies, ‘speaking,’ like Dares Phrygius of the heroes at Troy, ‘as he that saw them.’ In Nyren’s youth--say 1780--Hambledon was the centre of cricket. The boy had a cricketing education. He learned a little Latin of a worthy old Jesuit, but was a better hand at the fiddle. In that musical old England, where John Small, the noted bat, once charmed an infuriated bull by his minstrelsy, Nyren performed a moral miracle. He played to the gipsies, and so won their hearts that they always passed by his hen-roost when they robbed the neighbours. Music and cricket were the Hambledon man’s delight. His father, Richard Nyren, was, with Thomas Brett, one of the chief bowlers. Brett was ‘the fastest as well as straightest bowler that was ever known’; no _jerker_, but with a very high delivery. The height of the delivery was not _à la Spofforth_, but was got by sending the ball out from under the armpit. How this manœuvre could be combined with pace is a great mystery. Richard Nyren had this art, ‘always to the length.’ Brett’s bowling is described as ‘tremendous,’ yet Tom Sueter could stump off it--Tom of the honourable heart, and the voice so sweet, pure and powerful. Yet on those wickets Tom needed a long-stop to Brett--George Lear. The Bishop has seen three long-stops on to Brown; ‘but he _was_ a jerker.’ At that date the long-stop commonly dropped on one knee as he received the ball. An old Eton boy, G. B., who was at school between 1805 and 1814, says, in a letter to the _Standard_ (dated September 21, 1886), that ‘a pocket-handkerchief was allowed round the dropping knee of long-stop.’ A bowler with a low delivery was Lambert, ‘the little farmer.’ ‘His ball would twist from the off stump into the leg. _He was the first I remember who introduced this deceitful and teasing way of delivering the ball._’ Cricket was indeed rudimentary when a break from the off was a new thing. ‘The Kent and Surrey men could not tell what to make of that cursed twist of his.’ Lambert acquired the art as Daphnis learned his minstrelsy, while he tended his father’s sheep. He would set up hurdles instead of a net and bowl for hours. But it needed old Nyren to teach him to bowl outside the off stump, so little alert was the mind of this innovator. Among outsiders, Lumpy, the Surrey man, was the most accurate ‘to a length,’ and he was much faster than Lord Frederick Beauclerk. In these days the home bowlers pitched the wickets to suit themselves. Thus they had all the advantage of rough wickets on a slope; yet, even so, a yokel with pluck and ‘an arm as long as a hop-pole,’ has been known to slash Lumpy all over the field. But this could only have been done at single wicket. A curious bowler of this age was Noah Mann, the fleetest runner of his time, and a skilled horseman. He was a left-handed