Page:The Cricket Field (1854).djvu/27

Rh So grew polite: hence all her well-bred heirs

Gamesters and jockeys turned, and cricket-players."

Ep. I. b. ii., init.

However, we are happy to say that even among comparatively modern authors we have beaten Strutt in his researches by twenty-five years; for Edward Phillips, John Milton's nephew, in his "Mysteries of Love and Eloquence" (8vo. 1685), writes thus:—

We shall presently show the word Cricket, in Richelet, as early as the year 1680.

A late author has very sensibly remarked that Cricket could not have been popular in the days of Elizabeth, or we should expect to find allusions to that game, as to tennis, football, and other sports, in the early poets; but Shakspeare and the dramatists who followed, he observes, are silent on the subject.

As to the silence of the early poets and dramatists on the game of cricket—and no one conversant with English literature would expect to find it except in some casual allusion or illustration ia an old play—this silence we can confirm on the best authority. What if we presumed to advance that the early dramatists, one and all, ignore