A correspondent writes to the Editor to say that when travelling by the Hampton Court coach to Kingston on Shrove Tuesday, he was told that it was “Football Day,” and “was not a little amused to see, upon entering Teddington, all the inhabitants securing the glass of their front windows by placing hurdles before them, and some by nailing laths. At Twickenham, Bushy, and Hampton Wick they were all engaged in the same way. Having to stop a few hours at Kingston, I had an opportunity of seeing the whole custom.... At about 12 o’clock the ball is turned loose, and those who can kick it. I observed some persons of respectability following the ball: the game lasts about four hours, when the parties retire to the public-houses.”... The writer goes on to say that the corporation of Kingston tried to put a stop to the practice; but the judges confirmed the right to the game. Another correspondent, whose letter is published on page 374 of vol. ii. of the same book, describes how at that time (viz. 1827), a game of football was played every Sunday afternoon by Irishmen, upon an open space at Islington. The game commenced at three, and lasted until dusk, men of one county, as a rule, playing against men of another. The same writer goes on to say that when he was a boy he was accustomed to play football on a Sunday morning in the “church-piece” before church-time, in a village in the West of England; but from the tone of the letter it appears very evident that the writer looked upon football at that day as a game more of the past than of the present. In Scotland, however, football in this age was still a national pastime, and extensively patronized by the upper classes. In 1815 we read of a great football match being played at Carterhaugh in Ettrick Forest, between the Ettrick men and the men of Yarrow; the one party backed by the Earl of Home, and the other by Sir Walter Scott, then Sheriff of the forest. The latter wrote a couple of songs in honour of the occasion, from one of which we quote a verse,-- “Then strip, lads, and to it, though sharp be the weather; And if by mischance you should happen to fall, There are worse things in life than a tumble on heather, And life is itself but a game of football.” It is perhaps scarcely necessary to quote the lines from the “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” of the same poet, when, in the truce between the English and Scottish armies, sports were indulged in:-- “Some drive the jolly bowl about; With dice and draughts some chase the day; And some, with many a merry shout, In riot, revelry, and rout, Pursue the football play.” But independently of these extracts, there are many allusions through Scott’s works which testify to the acknowledged popularity of football in Scotland in the lifetime of the great novelist.