well
"for fifty years or more, and that when he was a scholar in the free
school at Guildford he and several of his companions did run and
play there at cricket and other plays." Also in Cotgrave's French
Dictionary, published in 1611, the word _crosse_ is translated "a
cricket-staff, or the crooked-staff wherewith boys play at cricket."

In the eighteenth century allusions to the game become more
frequent, although it was still a boy's game. It had its poet, who
sang--

"Hail, cricket, glorious, manly, British game,
First of all sports, be first alike in fame."

It had its calumniators, who said that it "propagated a spirit of
idleness" in bad times, when people ought to work and not play, and
that it encouraged gambling. But the game began to prosper, and
several noted men, poets and illustrious statesmen, recall the
pleasurable memories of their prowess with the bat and ball. In a
book of songs called _Pills to purge Melancholy_, published in 1719,
we find the verse--

"He was the prettiest fellow
At football or at cricket:
At hunting chase or nimble race
How featly he could prick it."

In the early part of the eighteenth century the game was in a very
rudimentary condition, very different from the scientific pastime it
has since become. There were only two wickets, a foot high and two
feet apart, with one long bail at the top. Between the wickets there
was a hole large enough to contain the ball, and when the batsman
made a run, he had to place the end of his bat in this hole before
the wicket-keeper could place the ball there, otherwise he would be
"run out."

The bat, too, was a curved, crooked arrangement very different from
our present weapon. The Hambledon Club, in Hampshire, which has
produced some famous players, seems to have been mainly instrumental
in reforming and improving the game. Its members introduced a limit
to the width of the bat, viz., four and a quarter inches--the
standard still in force--in order to prevent players, such as a hero
from Reigate, bringing bats as wide as the wicket. In 1775 they
wisely introduced a middle stump, as they found the best balls
harmlessly flying between the wide wickets. It was feared lest this
alteration would shorten the game too much, but it does not seem to
have had that effect, as in an All England match against the
Hambledon Club, two years later, one Aylward scored 167 runs, and
stayed in two whole days. England owes mu