It is vastly to the credit of cricket and of football that they should have survived the Puritan deluge and the decay of the athletic spirit at the end of the last century, and not have been laid in limbo together with stoolball, cambuc, and other games wherein the hearts of our forefathers rejoiced. The survival indicates an exceeding fitness. Still the storm of Puritanical hatred had been enough to kill even hardier plants than these, unless there had been some quiet haunts in which they existed unnoticed and unmolested. As to the pastimes of the ’prentice boys they perished; but in the quiet privacy of the country and in the almost monastic seclusion of some of our ancient public schools they continued to exist. For some reason or other, the foundation of Laurence Sheriff, at Rugby, was the locality in which, what we now call the Rugby game, but which, for reasons above mentioned, appears in reality to have been the pristine form of the game, was preserved. Now, since of every effect there is a cause, and since of this particular effect history supplies no cause that we are aware of, it becomes necessary to have recourse to conjecture; and since conjecture, to be probable, must proceed upon some sound basis, it seems to follow, that in order to discover why the game, distinguished by an absence of rules, survived in Rugby School, an inquiry should be made whether the conditions of football at Rugby were not different from what they were elsewhere. The answer to this question, once formulated, is manifest. The conditions of football were different at Rugby from those which prevailed at other schools; or rather, to put the matter in language paradoxical in appearance but literally correct, the conditions of the game were normal at Rugby and abnormal everywhere else. In fact, the original form of football,--for it is the simplest,--is of such a nature that it can hardly be played except in a wide open space. Such a space existed at Rugby from the beginning, but not at the other great public schools. The Eton boys had originally no other place to disport themselves in than the comparatively small inner field nearest the College buildings. The ancient Meads of the Winchester College are small in dimensions. At the Charterhouse they had originally no other playground than the cloisters; and though at Westminster the scholars were better provided for, yet they were confined to “Green.” Now, in small spaces of this kind it is obvious that the continual playing of football throughout the winter months must, almost of necessity, have resulted in the ruin of the playground for other purposes. For football is essentially a game for the many, and not for the few, and by its very nature involves the tearing up of turf and the ruin of greenswards. Therefore it was natural that in each particular school the rules of the game should be settled by the capacities of the playground; and, as these were