says Allan Ramsay, meaning the stool of repentance. If, then, stool-ball be the origin of cricket, and if a cricket be a stool, ‘cricket’ may be merely a synonym for stool-ball. Todd’s ‘Johnson,’ with ignominious ignorance, styles cricket ‘a sport in which the contenders drive a ball with sticks or bats in opposition to each other.’ Johnson must have known better. In the ‘Rambler,’ No. 30, he writes, ‘Sometimes an unlucky boy will drive his cricket-ball full in my face.’ Observe, he says ‘drive,’ not ‘cut,’ nor ‘hit to leg.’ Professor Skeat says nothing of this derivation of ‘cricket’ from cricket, a stool. He thinks ‘et’ may be a diminutive, added to the Anglo-Saxon _cricc_, a staff. If that be so, cricket will mean club-play rather than stool-ball. In any case, Professor Skeat has a valuable quotation of ‘cricket’ from the French and English Dictionary compiled in 1611, by Mr. Randle Cotgrave. He translates the French _crosse_, ‘a crosier, or bishop’s staffe, also a _cricket staffe_, or the crooked staffe wherewith boies play at cricket.’ Now the name of the club used in French Flanders at the local kind of golf is _la crosse_. It is a heavy, barbaric kind of golf-club.[13] Thanks to Cotgrave, then, we know that in 1611 cricket was a boy’s game, played with a crooked staff. The club, bat, or staff continued to be crooked or curved at the blade till the middle of the eighteenth century or later; and till nearly 1720 cricket was mainly a game for boys. We may now examine the authorities for the earliest mentions of cricket. People have often regarded Florio’s expression in his Italian Dictionary (1598) _cricket-a-wicket_ as the first mention of the noble game. It were strange indeed if this great word first dropped from the pen of an Italian! The quotation is ‘_sgrittare_, to make a noise as a cricket; to play _cricket-a-wicket_, and be merry.’ I have no doubt myself that this is a mere coincidence of sound. The cricket (on the hearth) is a merry little beast, or has that reputation. The term ‘cricket-a-wicket’ is a mere rhyming reduplication of sounds like ‘hob-nob’ or ‘tooral-ooral,’ or the older ‘Torelore,’ the name of a mythical country in a French romance of the twelfth century. It is an odd coincidence, no doubt, that the rhyming reduplication should associate wicket with cricket. But, for all that, ‘cricket-a-wicket’ must pair off with ‘helter-skelter,’ ‘higgledy-piggledy,’ and _Tarabara_ to which Florio gives cricket-a-wicket as an equivalent.[14] [Illustration: ‘Miss Wicket.’ (From an old print, 1770.)]