Amongst other great living players who incline to the "close game," we may mention Mr. Harrwitz, whose match with Morphy furnished not one brilliant game; also Messrs. Slous, Horwitz, Bledow, Szen, and others. But the tendency has been, ever since the celebrated and magnificent matches of the two greatest chess geniuses which England and France have ever known, McDonnel and De la Bourdonnais, to cultivate the bolder and more exciting open gambits. And under the lead of Paul Morphy this tendency is likely to be inaugurated as the rule of modern chess. Professor Anderssen, Mayet, Lange, and Von der Lasa, in Germany,--Dubois and Centurini, at Rome,--St. Amant, Laroche, and Lécrivain, of Paris,--Löwenthal, Perigal, Kipping, Owen, Mengredien, etc., of London,--are all players of the heroic sort, and the games recently played by some of them with Morphy are perhaps the finest on record. And certainly, whatever may be said of their tendency to promote careless and reckless play, the open and daring games are at once more interesting, more brief, and more conducive to the mental drill which has been claimed as a sufficient compensation for the outlay of thought and time demanded by chess. We have already given some specimens of the Poetry of Chess. The Chess Philosophy itself has penetrated every direction of literature. From the time that Miranda is "discovered playing chess with Ferdinand" in Prospero's cell, (an early instance of "discovered mate,") the numberless Mirandas of Romance have played for and been played for mates. Chess has even its Mythology,--Caïssa being now, we believe, generally received at the Olympian Feasts. True, some one has been wicked enough to observe that all chess-stories are divisible into two classes,--in one a man plays for his own soul with the Devil, in the other the hero plays and wins a wife,--and to beg for a chess-story _minus_ wives and devils; but such grumblers are worthless baggage, and ought to be checked. The Chess Library has now become an important collection. Time was, when, if one man had Staunton's "Handbook," Sarratt, Philidor, Walker's "Thousand Games," and Lewis on "The Game of Chess," he was regarded as uniting the character of a chess-scholar with that of the antiquary. But now we hear of Bledow of Berlin with eight hundred volumes on chess; and Professor George Allen, of the University of Pennsylvania, with more than a thousand! Such a literature has Chess collected about it since Paolo Boi, "the great Syracusan," as he was called, wrote what perhaps was the first work on chess, in the middle of the sixteenth century.