Cricket lies within the reach of average powers. A good head will compensate for hand and heels. It is no monopoly for a gifted few, nor are we soon superannuated. It affords scope for a great diversity of talent. Bowling, fielding, wicket-keeping, free hitting, safe and judicious play, and good generalship--in one of these points many a man has earned a name, though inferior in the rest. There are good batsmen and the best of fields among near-sighted men, and hard hitters among weak and crippled men; in weight, nine stone has proved not too little for a first-rate, nor eighteen stone too much; and, as to age, Mr. Ward at sixty, Mr. E. H. Budd at sixty-five, and old John Small at seventy years of age, were useful men in good elevens. Cricket is a game available to poor as well as rich; it has no privileged class. Unlike shooting, hunting, or yachting, there is no leave to ask, licence to buy, nor costly establishment to support: the game is free and common as the light and air in which it is played,--the poor man’s portion: with the poorer classes it originated, played “after hours” on village greens, and thence transplanted to patrician lawns. We extract the following:-- “The judge of the Brentford County Court has decided that cricket is a legal game, so as to render the stakeholder liable in an action for the recovery of the stakes, in a case where one of the parties had refused to play.” Cricket is not solely a game of skill--chance has sway enough to leave the vanquished an _if_ and a _but_. A long innings bespeaks good play; but “out the first ball” is no disgrace. A game, to be really a game, really playful, should admit of chance as well as skill. It is the bane of chess that its character is too severe--to lose its games is to lose your character; and most painful of all, to be outwitted in a fair and undeniable contest of long-headedness, tact, manœuvring, and common sense--qualities in which no man likes to come off second best. Hence the restless nights and unforgiving state of mind that often follows a checkmate. Hence that “agony of rage and disappointment from which,” said Sydney Smith, “the Bishop of ---- broke my head with a chess-board fifty years ago at college.”