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xvi To pass from the Rev. John Mitford to the Rev. James Pycroft and The Cricket Field is a very easy transition, for it was upon the MS. volume (where is it now?) of Fennex's reminiscences, which the older enthusiast sent to the younger in 1836, that the historical part of that book was founded. The Cricket Field, from the second edition of which (1854) I quote the two chapters on the Hambledon men (together with other matters elsewhere in these pages), remains, after Nyren, the best book on the game. It has that blend of simplicity and enthusiasm which is essential to the good writer on cricket and cricketers. Mr. Pycroft does not seem to have known Nyren personally, but he had the inestimable advantage of conversing with William Beldham, and these conversations, together with the Fennex MS. and correspondence with Mr. Budd (with whom he had also played), put him in a stronger position than any historian of the game can ever occupy again. The Cricket Field is now in its tenth edition, and will, I hope, reach many more.

In 1836 James Pycroft was twenty-three years of age, and had just become a B.A. of Oxford, and in that same year he immortalized his memory by reviving, with Bishop Ryle, the Oxford and Cambridge match. Four years later, in 1840, he took orders, and, subsequently settling at Bath, played for the Lansdown Club, and spent most of his leisure in preparing The Cricket Field, 1851; The Cricket Tutor, 1862; Cricketana, 1865, and other books,