As Ben Jonson says, Shakespeare had "small Latin and less Greek"--perhaps none--and this was probably due to his leaving the Grammar School before the average age. However that may have been, we may be pretty sure that all the regular schooling he ever had was got there. FOOTNOTES: [4] Some believe it got the name from having the letters arranged in the form of a cross, as they sometimes were; but the other explanation seems to me the more probable. [5] In a preceding chapter we are told that it was a rule for "all of a form to name who is the best of their form, and who is the best next him." PART IV. GAMES AND SPORTS [Illustration] BOYISH GAMES Young William may have found life at the Henley Street house and at the Grammar School rather dull, but there was no lack of diversion and recreation out of doors. Household comforts and attractions were meagre enough in those days, but holidays were frequent, and rural sports and pastimes for young and old were many and varied. We may be sure that Shakespeare enjoyed these to the full. His writings abound in allusions to them which were doubtless reminiscences of his own boyhood. Many of the children's games to which he refers are familiar to small folk now, especially in the rural districts. Hide-and-seek, for example--also known as "hoop-and-hide" and "harry-racket"--is probably the play that Hamlet had in mind when he exclaimed (iv. 2. 33), "Hide, fox, and after." Blind-man's-buff is also alluded to by Hamlet when, chiding his mother for preferring his uncle to his father, he asks: "What devil was 't That thus hath cozen'd you at hoodman-blind." A dictionary of Shakespeare's time couples this name for the pastime with the one that has survived: "The Hoodwinke play, or hoodmanblinde, in some places called the blindmanbuf." Hamlet's question is evidently suggested by the practice of making the "blind man" guess whom he has caught--as Greek and Roman boys did when they played the game. In the grave-digging scene (v. 1. 100) Hamlet asks: "Did these bones cost no more the breeding but to play at loggats with them?" This refers to the throwing of _loggats_ or _loggets_--small logs, or sticks of wood much like "Indian clubs"--at a stake, the player coming nearest to it being the winner. In a poem of 1611 we find loggats in a list of games with sundry others that are still in vogue:-- "To wrastle, play at stooleball, or to runne, To pich the Barre, or to shoote off a Gunne, To play at Loggets, Nine-holes, or Ten-pinnes; To try it out at Foot-ball by the shinnes." [Illustration: HIDE-AND-SEEK] Stool-ball, commonly played by girls and women, sometimes in company with boys or men, is to this day a village pastime in some parts of England. It is essentially a lighter kind of cricket, but is more ancient than that game.