Pitching the bar was an athletic exercise still common in Scotland. Scott alludes to it in _The Lady of the Lake_, iv. 559:-- "Now, if thou strik'st her but one blow, I'll pitch thee from the cliff as far As ever peasant pitch'd a bar!" And again, in the account of the sports at Stirling Castle, v. 647:-- "Their arms the brawny yeomen bare To hurl the massive bar in air." A poet of the 16th century tells us that to throw "the stone, the bar, or the plummet" is a commendable exercise for kings and princes; and, according to the old chroniclers, it was a favorite diversion with Henry VIII. after his accession to the throne. Nine-holes, a game in which nine holes were made in a board or in the ground at which small balls were rolled, is among the rustic sports enumerated by Drayton in the _Poly-Olbion_. There were many ball-games besides stool-ball in the days of Elizabeth, from the simple hand-ball, which Homer represents the princess of Corcyra as playing with her maidens, to more complicated exercises, among which we can recognize the germ of the later "rounders," out of which our Yankee base-ball has been developed. The term _base_, as denoting a starting-point or goal, occurs in the name of other than ball-games, especially in "prisoners' base"--sometimes "prisoners' bars," or "prison-bars"--which was popular long before Shakespeare was born. It is played by two sides, who occupy opposite bases, or "homes." Any player running out from his base is chased by the opposite party, and if caught is made a prisoner. It belongs to a class of old games, one of the most popular of which was called "barley-break." Originally, this was played by three couples, male and female; one couple was stationed in "hell" or the space between the two goals, and tried to catch the others as they ran across. It is thus described by Sir Philip Sidney in the _Arcadia_:-- "Then couples three be straight allotted there; They of both ends the middle two do fly; The two that in mid-space, Hell called, were Must strive, with waiting foot and watching eye, To catch of them, and them to Hell to bear, That they, as well as they, may Hell supply." Later it came to be played by any number of young people, of either sex or both, with one person in "hell" at the start. The game was kept up until all had been captured and brought into this Inferno. In this form, under the name of "Lill-lill"--which was the signal cry of the person between the goals for beginning the sport--it was played by schoolboys in eastern Massachusetts fifty years ago. Barley-break is often alluded to by the dramatists and lyrists of Shakespeare's day, and complete poems were written upon it by Suckling, Herrick, and others. Shakespeare does not mention it, though he has several references to prisoners' base; as in _Cymbeline_ (v. 3. 20):--