The game of cricket, philosophically considered, is a standing panegyric on the English character: none but an orderly and sensible race of people would so amuse themselves. It calls into requisition all the cardinal virtues, some moralist would say. As with the Grecian games of old, the player must be sober and temperate. Patience, fortitude, and self-denial, the various bumps of order, obedience, and good-humour, with an unruffled temper, are indispensable. For intellectual virtues we want judgment, decision, and the organ of concentrativeness--every faculty in the free use of all its limbs--and every idea in constant air and exercise. Poor, rickety, and stunted wits will never serve: the widest shoulders are of little use without a head upon them: the cricketer wants wits down to his fingers’ ends. As to physical qualifications, we require not only the volatile spirits of the Irishman _Rampant_, nor the phlegmatic caution of the Scotchman _Couchant_, but we want the English combination of the two; though, with good generalship, cricket is a game for Britons generally: the three nations would mix not better in a regiment than in an eleven; especially if the Hibernian were trained in London, and taught to enjoy something better than what Father Prout terms his supreme felicity, “Otium cum dig-_gin-taties_.” It was from the southern and south-eastern counties of England that the game of Cricket spread--not a little owing to the Propaganda of the metropolitan clubs, which played chiefly first at the Artillery Ground, then at White Conduit Fields, and thirdly at Thomas Lord’s Grounds, (of which there were two before the present “Lord’s,”) as well as latterly at the Oval, Kennington, and on all sides of London--through all the southern half of England; and during these last twenty years the northern counties, and even Edinburgh, have sent forth distinguished players. But considering that the complement of the game is twenty-two men, besides two Umpires and two Scorers; and considering also that cricket, unlike every other manly contest, by flood or field, occupies commonly more than one day; the railways, as might be expected, have tended wonderfully to the diffusion of cricket,--giving rise to clubs depending on a circle of some thirty or forty miles, as also to that club in particular under the canonised saint, John Zingari, into whom are supposed to have migrated all the erratic spirits of the gipsy tribe. The Zingari are a race of ubiquitous cricketers, exclusively gentlemen-players; for cricket affords to a race of professionals a merry and abundant, though rather a laborious livelihood, from the time the first May-fly is up to the time the first pheasant is down. Neither must we forget the All England and United Elevens, who, under the generalship of Clarke or Wisden, play numbers varying from fourteen to twenty-two in almost every county in England. So proud are provincial clubs of this honour that, besides a subscription of