I do not expect ever to see again anything to equal it. But I am proud and glad to have been there, to have taken part in that tribute to the greatest hearted cricketer the world has ever known. VI How many hours during the year, I wonder, must we spend over our _Wisden_? A great many surely, so many, indeed, that we cannot help thinking how small is the literature of cricket. Only two shelves out of thirty. There are one or two novels, _Willow the King_, A. A. Milne’s _The Day’s Play_, a few of Mr Lucas’s Essays, the complete works of P. F. Warner, W. J. Ford’s _Middlesex Cricket_, Lord Harris’s _Lord’s and the M.C.C._, a few volumes of reminiscence, one or two textbooks, P. G. Wodehouse’s delightful _Mike, The Hambleden Men_, and Neville Cardus. Poor stuff, too, for the most part. The literature of cricket can be divided into two categories. There are the books by men who understand cricket but do not know how to write, and the books by the men who know how to write but do not understand cricket. In the course of a year many books and stories dealing with the game are published, but only rarely in a generation comes combined the sportsman and the man of letters. Whom have we to-day: P. G. Wodehouse; but he prefers to write of golf. A. A. Milne; but he is dabbling in grease paint. E. V. Lucas; but so rarely nowadays. Neville Cardus; yes, the only one, the only genuine one, perhaps. The first man to make literature out of cricket. His essay on Tom Richardson; his description of Maclaren leaving the field for the last time at Eastbourne; his “Greatest Test Match.” They were written for the columns of a daily paper, but there is literature in them, real prose, real melody, real emotion. He is alone, though, Neville Cardus. Hardly any poetry has been written about the game. There is Thompson’s “Oh, my Hornby and my Barlow Long Ago,” and there is a quantity of verse, pleasant jingly stuff of the drinking-song variety, the best of it valedictory, such as Andrew Lang’s “Beneath the Daisies Now They Lie.” But the few attempts that have been made at serious poetry have not been fortunate. Edward Cracroft Lefroy, for example, to whom cricket appealed chiefly as an æsthetic spectacle, included in his catalogue of the physical attributes of a bowler the Elbows apt to make the leather spin Up the slow bat and round the unwary shin, which is not only poor verse but proves on the part of the author an inadequate knowledge of the no-ball rule.