There is no call for any one to vindicate this game. Chess is a great, worldwide fact. Wherever a highway is found, there, we may be sure, a reason existed for a highway. And when we find that the explorer on his northward voyage, pausing a day in Iceland, may pass his time in keen encounters with the natives,--that the trader in Kamtschatka and China, unable to speak a word with the people surrounding him, yet holds a long evening's converse over the board which is polyglot,--that the missionary returns from his pulpit, and the Hindoo from his widow-burning, to engage in a controversy without the _theologicum odium_ attached,--the game becomes authentic from its universality. It is akin to music, to love, to joy, in that it sets aside alike social caste and sectarian differences: kings and peasants, warriors and priests, lords and ladies, mingle over the board as they are represented upon it. "The earliest chess-men on the banks of the Sacred River were worshippers of Buddha; a player whose name and fame have grown into an Arabic proverb was a Moslem; a Hebrew Rabbi of renown, in and out of the Synagogues, wrote one of the finest chess poems extant; a Catholic priest of Spain has bestowed his name upon two openings; one of the foremost problem--composers of the age is a Protestant clergyman of England; and the Greek Church numbers several cultivators of chess unrivaled in our day." It has received eulogies from Burton,--from Castiglione,--from Chatham, who, in reply to a compliment on a grand stroke of invention and successful oratory, said, "My success arose only from having been checkmated by discovery, the day before, at chess,"--from Comenius, the grammarian,--from Condé, Cowley, Denham, Justus van Effen, Sir Thomas Elyot, Guillim, Helvetia, Huarte, Sir William Jones, Leibnitz, Lydgate, Olaus Magnus, Pasquier, Sir Walter Raleigh, Rousseau, Voltaire, Samuel Warren, Warton, Franklin, Buckle, and many others of ability in every department of letters, philosophy, and art. We know of but one man of genius or learning--who has repudiated it,--Montaigne. "Or if he [Alexander] played at chess," says Montaigne, "what string of his soul was not touched by this idle and childish game? I hate and avoid it because it is not play enough,--that it is too grave and serious a diversion; and I am ashamed to lay out as much thought and study upon that as would serve to much better uses." Looked at simply as a diversion, chess might naturally impress a man of intellectual earnestness thus. It is not a diversion; a recreation it may be called, but only as any variation from "the shop" is recreative. But chess has, by the experiences of many, sufficiently proved itself to have serious uses to men of thought, and in the way of an intellectual gymnasium. It is to the limbs and sinews of the mind--prudence, foresight, memory, combination, analysis--just what a gymnasium is to the body. In it every muscle, every joint of the