Keep your body as composed and easy as the requisite adjustment of the left leg will admit; let your arms do the hitting; and remember the wrists. The whiz that meets the ear will be a criterion of increasing power. Practise hard hitting,--that is, the full and timely application of your strength, not only for the value of the extra score, but because hard hitting and correct and clean hitting are one and the same thing. Mere stopping balls and poking about in the blockhole is not cricket, however successful; and I must admit, that one of the most awkward, poking, vexatious blockers that ever produced a counterfeit of cricket, defied Bayley and Cobbett at Oxford in 1836,--three hours, and made five and thirty runs. Another friend, a better player, addicted to the same teasing game, in a match at Exeter in 1845, blocked away till his party, the N. Devon, won the match, chiefly by byes and wide balls! Such men might have turned their powers to much better account. Some maintain that anything that succeeds is cricket; but not such cricket as full-grown men should vote a scientific and a manly exercise; otherwise, to “run cunning” might be Coursing, and to kill sitting Shooting. A player may happen to succeed with what is not generally a successful style,--winning in spite of his awkwardness, and not by virtue of it. But there is another cogent reason for letting your arms, and not your body, do the work,--namely, that it makes all the difference to your sight whether the level of the eye remains the same as with a composed and easy hitter; or, unsteady and changing, as with the wriggling and the clumsy player. Whether a ball undulates in the air, or whether there is an equal undulation in the line of the eye which regards that ball, the confusion and indistinctness is the same. As an experiment, look at any distant object, and move your head up and down, and you will understand the confusion of sight to which I allude. The only security of a good batsman, as of a good shot, consists in the hand and eye being habituated to act together. Now, the hand may obey the eye when at rest, but have no such habit when in unsteady motion. And this shows how uncertain all hitting must be, when, either by the movement of the body or other cause, the line of sight is suddenly raised or depressed. The same law of sight shows the disadvantage of men who stand at guard very low, and then suddenly raise themselves as the ball is coming. The same law of sight explains the disadvantage of stepping in to hit, especially with a slow dropping ball: the eye is puzzled by a double motion--the change in the level of the ball, and the change in the level of the line of sight.