Already, in 1790, the game was spreading northwards, or, rather, proofs exist that it had long before struck far and wide its roots and branches in northern latitudes; and also that it was a game as popular with the men of labour as the men of leisure, and therefore incontestably of home growth: no mere exotic, or importation of the favoured few, can cricket be, if, like its namesake, it is found “a household word” with those whom Burns aptly calls “the many-aproned sons of mechanical life.” In 1791 Eton, that is, the old Etonians, played Marylebone, four players given on either side; and all true Etonians will thank us for informing them, not only that the seven Etonians were more than a match for their adversaries, but also that this match proves that Eton had, at that early date, the honour of sending forth the most distinguished amateurs of the day; for Lord Winchelsea, Hon. H. Fitzroy, Earl Darnley, Hon. E. Bligh, C. Anguish, Assheton Smith--good men and true--were Etonians all. This match was played in Burley Park, Rutlandshire. On the following day, June 25th, 1791, the Marylebone played eleven yeomen and artisans of Leicester; and though the Leicestrians cut a sorry figure, still the fact that the Midland Counties practised cricket sixty years ago is worth recording. Peter Heward, of Leicester, a famous wicket-keeper, of twenty years since, told me of a trial match in which he saw his father, quite an old man, with another veteran of his own standing, quickly put out with the old-fashioned slow bowling a really good Eleven for some twenty runs--good, that is, against the modern style of bowling; and cricket was not a new game in this old man’s early days (say 1780) about Leicester and Nottingham, as the score in page 41 alone would prove; for such a game as cricket, evidently of gradual development, must have been played in some primitive form many a long year before the date of 1775, in which it had excited sufficient interest, and was itself sufficiently matured in form, to show the two Elevens of Sheffield and of Nottingham. Add to this, what we have already mentioned, a rude form of cricket as far north as Angus and Lothian in 1700, and we can hardly doubt that cricket was known as early in the Midland as in the Southern Counties. The men of Nottingham--land of Clarke, Barker, and Redgate--next month, in the same year (1791) threw down the gauntlet, and shared the same fate; and next day the Marylebone, “adding,” in a cricketing sense, “insult unto injury,” played twenty-two of them, and won by thirteen runs.