Page:Cricket (Hutchinson, 1903).djvu/219

Rh Oval, and would yet allow the music-hall and the theatre to stifle their nightly victims. The strictest of Puritans could hardly find fault with bat and ball as being the inculcators of evil principles; rather, like the study of the ingenuous arts, do they "soften our characters and forbid them to be savage." The cynic and the rhymer have had their say, but cricket is still with us, and seems likely to stay, howl as they will.

In connection with the game's advance, it would be unjust not to acknowledge the fillip that has been given to it by the periodical visits of Australian elevens, the first of which occurred as far back as 1878, combined with the return of their calls by our men. It was a new truth to us that there was growing up in Greater Britain a race of men who, taught by ourselves, profiting by our lessons, and in the process of time perhaps improving on our methods, were able to withstand us to our face, the pupil often proving the superior of the master; and it may be that to this fact, and the perhaps unconscious conviction that "the old man" must not be "beaten by the boy" at cricket as at chess, is due the uprise of county cricket as the readiest means of ascertaining our strength and organising our resources, though it was not till several years after the first visit of Australians that any real attempt to organise county cricket into a formal competition succeeded. Such an attempt had been made in 1872 by the Marylebone Cricket Club, which offered a cup in that year for competition among the counties, but the offer