After the downfall of the Puritan Government and of the supremacy of Puritan opinions, as every student of history well knows, the Maypoles were set up again in the country, and simple folk resumed their dancing and the like rustic sports. But it is rather the fashion of concise historians to represent changes of this kind as more rapid than they are in actual fact; and it is probably nearer the truth to say that the Puritan habits and feelings which came over England in the earlier part of the 17th century have never really lost their hold of the nation, and are even in this day dying hard. Certain it is, at any rate, if any certainty can be gathered from the literature which is, as it were, the crystallized thought of an age, that until the present generation athletic sports have never so much formed a part of the life of the English people as they did before the Puritan epoch. The direction of a straw is sufficient to show which way the wind is blowing; and the apparently insignificant fact that references to football and other early English games are rare in the literature of the eighteenth century, is almost sufficient in itself to prove the decrease in the popularity of the game. Some old towns and districts clung to the ancient and simple form of the game, and cling to it still up to the present day; but it will not be too much to say, that from the date of the Restoration until the time of the great athletic revival in the last thirty or forty years, the popularity of the ancient game of football was steadily declining, though never in any danger of complete extinction. Let us give the generation who abandoned their ardour for football their due, and say that they became more serious, more earnest, and less brutal in their sports. The fact, however, of the decline in the popularity of the game remains the same, and with the chronicling of that fact we must remain content. So early as 1675 we learn from a satire that the apprentices of London were no longer content with a game of football on Shrove Tuesday or any such holiday, but preferred the by no means modern amusement of a political demonstration. Says the anonymous satirist of the ’prentices,-- “They’re mounted high, contemn the humble play Of rap or foot-ball on a holiday In Fines-bury-fieldes. No; ’tis their brave intent Wisely t’ advise the king and parliament.”