king and courtiers, as we see from Pepys and others, and all in the land that Henry's Act would permit, plied the racket, till the state of matters was very much what we have seen Dunbar satirising in the Scotland of the pleasure-loving James V.

In December, 1663, we find the gossipping Secretary to the Admiralty, "walking through Whitehall, I heard the king was gone to play at tennis. So I down to the new tennis court, and saw him and Sir Arthur Slingsby play against my Lord of Suffolk and my Lord Chesterfield. The king beat three and lost two sets, they all, and he particularly, playing well, I thought." Though Mr. Pepys is ready to give all praise where praise is due, the sycophancy of his brother courtiers is sometimes too much for him, as when he writes on 4th January, 1664: "Thence to the tennis court, and there saw the king play at tennis, and others: but to see how the king's play was extolled without any excuse at all, was a loathsome sight, though sometimes, indeed, he did play very well, and deserved to be commended, but such open flattery is beastly."

Ossory, Arran, Prince Rupert, and many others, are specially praised for their tennis play at this time. Pepys records a great match he witnessed between Prince Rupert and Cooke, the Master of the king's tennis court, against Baptist May and Chichly, in the Whitehall court, on 2nd September, 1667. "I went to see a great match at tennis between Prince Rupert and one Captain Cooke against Bab May and the elder Chichly, where the king was, and the court, and it seems they are the best players at tennis in the nation. But this puts me in mind of what I observed in the morning, that the king, playing at tennis, had a steeleyard carried to him, and I was told it was to weigh him after he had done playing and at noon Mr. Ashburnham told me that it is only the king's curiosity which he usually hath of weighing himself before and after his play, to see how much he loses

:

in weight by playing, and this day he lost four and a half pounds."

When the Duke of York paid his famous visit to Edinburgh, in 1679-82, the royal party occupied Holyrood House, where they gave balls, masquerades, and private theatricals, much to the enjoyment of the nobility and gentry that attended the court, though the more rigid Presbyterians were horror-struck. (It may be interesting to note here that the Scotch ladies tasted tea at these parties for the first time in Scotland.) The duke and his attendants played golf and tennis; this last in the old tennis court of Edinburgh, which stood immediately without the Water Gate, beside "Queen Mary's Bath," and quite close to the palace. This tennis court also served for a theatre for the company of actors the duke brought from England; and in this connection we may mention that the old buildingwhich in the past had served for the few theatrical entertainments in Scotland then-had good grounds for the boast that Shakespeare acted in it during Lawrence Fletcher's tour with his company of "king's servants" in 1603. It is not absolutely certain that the great dramatist was in Scotland then with Fletcher; but Mr. Charles Knight has shown from internal evidence in " Macbeth," and from other circumstances, that it is highly probable he was. The tennis court by the Water Gate, after it had become a weavers' workhouse, was burnt to the ground in the year 1777, many years after the game for which it had been built had died out in Scotland. The last celebrated Scotch cach-players are said to have been James Hepburn of Keith and his famous contemporary, John Law of Lauriston, Comptroller-General of the Finances of France, and projector of the Mississippi Scheme. A game is still played by school-boys in some parts of Scotland which they call "cage-ball;" it is a rough kind of "fives," but probably in itself, as in its name, it is a reminiscence in a corrupted form of the old cach. As far as we know, there is not a single tennis court now in Scotland.

During the last century the records of tennis are meagre : it seems to have been played only in one or two places. According to Horace Walpole, indeed, in his "Memoirs of the Reign of King George II.," it was a game played by Frederick, Prince of Wales, and it shares with cricket and a fall while riding the imputation of being the cause of the prince's death. Speaking of his sudden death, Walpole says: "An imposthume had broken, which, on his being opened, the physicians were of opinion had not been occasioned by the fall, but from a blow of a tennis ball three years before."

Even in England it may be said that tennis as a popular amusement went out with the Stuarts. Of course the pastime has never actually died out, and in recent years it has had increased attention paid to it, but even now the number of courts does not appear to exceed a score. Tennis," says

the Edinburgh Reviewer we have already quoted, "the most perfect of games, because with the most continuous certainty it exercises and rewards all the faculties of the players, has only been prevented hitherto from becoming as popular as it deserves, from its being, under its original condition, so expensive, so difficult to learn, and so puzzling to count, as to discourage those who were not 'to the manner born' from touching it. The first difficulty of expense seemed for the many insuperable, until the recent revival turned the ancient and noble but almost moribund game out to grass, and introduced the rudiments of it to the broad levels of a thousand English lawns. To build a tennis court cost from £3,000 to £4,000. Now a few rackets, a few sixpenny balls and a net, with some streaks of whitewash to mark your limits, and le jeu est fait."

Lawn tennis, however, like the pastime, croquet, it drove off the lawn, is not a new form of tennis. It is at least three centuries old, for in 1591, when Queen Elizabeth was entertained at Elvetham, in Hampshire, by the Earl of Hertford, Strutt, quoting from Nichols' "Progress of Queen Elizabeth,"

tells us that "after dinner, about three o'clock, ten of his lordship's servants, all Somersetshire men, in a square green court, before Her Majesty's window, did hang up lines, squaring out the form of a tennis court, and making a cross line in the middle. In this square they, being stript out of their doublets, played, five to five, with hand ball, at bord and cord, as they termed it, to the great liking of Her Highness."

56

CHAPTER V.

BALLOON BALL.

"O, sweet lady, 'tis a strong play with the arm."

Eastward Hoe, Old Play.

Of the many good old English games, once great favourites in this country, but now so obsolete as to require explanatory notes in the old poets or dramatists that allude to them, one of the best was the "Baloun" of the Middle Ages, a game that our ancestors owed to the Romans, either directly or, which is more likely, through the Italians during the time when the influence exercised by Italy in the common affairs of England was very great. The old English "Baloun," or balloon ball, was a game played with a large inflated ball of strong leather, the players on the opposite sides striking it backwards and forwards with the hand, on which they generally wore a bracer of wood to lend force and a peculiar motion to the ball.

The rudiments of the game we clearly find in the follis or folliculus of the Romans, among whom, as we know from many references in classical authors, this was a very favourite means of gentle exercise. It was especially the game of old men and boys, who found in the large, but very light, inflated ball of leather a pastime that healthily exercised without unduly taxing their weak muscles. Besides this, however, it held a prominent place among the more or less severe varieties of ball-play that the Romans of all ages indulged in to cause perspiration before the daily bath that, along with the exercise, was such an essential in their idea of a regular and healthy mode of life. "Among the Romans," says Dr. J. H. Krause, "in the Republican, as well as Imperial days, ball-play was univer