[Illustration: The Royal Academy Club in Marylebone Fields. (After Hayman, R.A. The property of the M.C.C.)] Lord’s is, as all the world knows, the scene, not only of Club and of Middlesex matches, but of Eton and Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge, and Gentlemen and Players, which is also contested at the Oval. Winchester used moreover to play Eton here, but the head-masters have long preferred a home and home affair. In other chapters these great matches will be chronicled and criticised. * * * * * The various epochs in the history of the game may now be briefly enumerated by way of summary. First we have the prehistoric age, when cricket was dimly struggling to evolve itself out of the rudimentary forms of cat-and-dog, and stool-ball. This preceded 154-, when we find an authentic mention of the name of CRICKET. Just about the end of the seventeenth century it was mainly a boys’ game. With the Augustan age it began to be taken up by statesmen, and satirised by that ideal whippersnapper, the ingenious but in all respects unsportsmanlike, Mr. Pope. By 1750 the game was matter of heavy bets, and scores began to be recorded. The old Hambledon Club gave it dignity, and the veterans endured till quite modern times dawn with Mr. Ward. Then came the prosperous heresy of round-hand bowling, which battled for existence till about 1845, when it became a recognised institution. The wandering clubs, chiefly I. Z. and the Free Foresters at first, carried good examples into the remoter gardens of our country. The migratory professional teams, the United and All England Elevens at least, showed the yokels what style meant, and taught them that Jackson and Tinley were their masters. But the lesson lasted too long. Nothing was less exhilarating than the spectacle of twenty provincial players, with Hodgson and Slinn, making many duck’s eggs, and fielding in a mob. ‘The first ‘ad me on the knee, the next on the wrist, the next blacked my eye, and the fourth bowled me,’ says the Pride of the Village, in ‘Punch,’ after enjoying ‘a hover from Jackson.’ Such violent delights had violent ends. The old travelling elevens are extinct, but railways have ‘turned large England to a little’ field, so to speak, and clubs may now meet which of old scarcely knew each other by name. The Australian elevens have in recent days given a great impulse to patriotic exertions.