Macduff says: "the time you may so hoodwink." There
may also have been a reference to falconry--the hawks being hooded in the
intervals of sport. Thus, in Latham's "Falconry" (1615), "to hood" is
the term used for the blinding, "to unhood" for the unblinding.

_Horse-racing._ That this diversion was in Shakespeare's day
occasionally practised in the spirit of the modern turf is evident from
"Cymbeline" (iii. 2):

"I have heard of riding wagers,
Where horses have been nimbler than the sands
That run i' the clock's behalf."

Burton,[799] too, who wrote at the close of the Shakespearian era,
mentions the ruinous consequences of this recreation: "Horse races are
desports of great men, and good in themselves, though many gentlemen by
such means gallop quite out of their fortunes."

[799] "Anatomy of Melancholy;" Drake's "Shakespeare and His
Times," vol. ii. p. 298.

_Leap-frog._ One boy stoops down with his hands upon his knees, and
others leap over him, every one of them running forward and stooping in
his turn. It is mentioned by Shakespeare in "Henry V." (v. 2), where he
makes the king say, "If I could win a lady at leap-frog, or by vaulting
into my saddle with my armour on my back, ... I should quickly leap into
a wife." Ben Jonson, in his comedy of "Bartholomew Fair," speaks of "a
leappe frogge chance note."

_Laugh-and-lie-down_ (more properly laugh-and-lay-down) was a game at
cards, to which there is an allusion in the "Two Noble Kinsmen" (ii. 1):

"_Emilia._ I could laugh now.

_Waiting-woman._ I could lie down, I'm sure."

_Loggat._ The game so called resembles bowls, but with notable
differences.[800] First, it is played, not on a green, but on a floor
strewed with ashes. The jack is a wheel of _lignum vitae_, or other hard
wood, nine inches in diameter, and three or four inches thick. The
loggat, made of apple-wood, is a truncated cone, twenty-six or
twenty-seven inches in length, tapering from a girth of eight and a half
to nine inches at one end to three and a half or four inches at the
other. Each player has three loggats, which he throws, holding lightly
the thin end. The object is to lie as near the jack as possible. Hamlet
speaks of this game (v. 1): "Did these bones cost no more the breeding,
but to play at loggats with 'em?" comparing, perhaps, the skull to the
jack at which the bones were thrown. In Ben Jonson's "Tale of a Tub"
(iv. 5) we re